Jane Austen published Emma in December 1815. The novel follows Emma Woodhouse, whom Austen described in a letter as "a heroine whom no one but myself will much like", a judgment that has not proven accurate but identifies something real about the novel's central challenge. Emma is twenty-one, intelligent, imaginative, comfortably wealthy, and convinced that she possesses an accurate understanding of the people around her. She decides to manage the romantic life of Harriet Smith, a sweet-natured girl of obscure parentage, steering her away from Robert Martin, a respectable farmer, and toward Mr. Elton, the local vicar. This plan miscarries comprehensively, as does the next one involving Frank Churchill, and the narrative tracks Emma's accumulating errors of interpretation.
Austen structures Emma around a technique she uses more extensively here than in any other novel: allowing the reader to see what Emma cannot. Mr. Knightley's objections to Emma's management of Harriet are consistently correct, and Austen presents them clearly enough that attentive readers can track the pattern long before Emma does. This creates an unusual double experience, pleasure in Emma's company and simultaneous awareness of her limitations, that requires Austen to make Emma genuinely charming while making her errors genuinely consequential. The Mr. Elton proposal scene, where Emma discovers that Elton has been pursuing her rather than Harriet and is drunk in a carriage with her in the dark, manages to be both farcical and painful.
Emma is Austen's most technically accomplished novel and the one most interested in the relationship between intelligence and self-knowledge, how high native ability, unexercised on its own psychology, produces confident errors that damage other people. The novel's resolution, in which Emma revises her understanding of herself and others, is prepared so carefully that Austen can stage it in very few pages without feeling rushed. The question the novel leaves is not whether Emma deserves her happiness but whether the process of getting there, the damage done to Harriet in particular, was as recoverable as the novel somewhat quickly assumes.
Jane Austen was secretly engaged for one day in 1802 before changing her mind the very next morning.
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