Emma

“I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” Austen’s famous remark about Emma Woodhouse — recorded by her nephew — turned out to be one of the few predictions this consummate observer got wrong. Emma has been liked, loved, argued over, and adapted more or less continuously for two centuries.

Emma at a glance

Author	Jane Austen
Written	January 1814 – March 1815, at Chawton
Published	December 1815 (dated 1816), by John Murray, in three volumes
Length	About 160,000 words; 55 chapters
Reading time	Ten to twelve hours
Setting	Highbury, a village in Surrey, over about a year
Heroine	Emma Woodhouse, aged twenty going on twenty-one
Hero	Mr. George Knightley, of Donwell Abbey
Read it	Free online, chapter by chapter

What is Emma about?

The novel opens on the day of a wedding. Emma’s governess and companion, Miss Taylor, has married a neighbour, Mr. Weston, and Emma, who arranged the match (or thinks she did), is left at Hartfield with her kindly, anxious, valetudinarian father. She is bored, confident and convinced she has a gift.

Her new project is Harriet Smith, a sweet, pretty seventeen-year-old of unknown parentage at the local school. Emma persuades Harriet to turn down a proposal from Robert Martin, a respectable young farmer, and sets her sights instead on the vicar, Mr. Elton. That goes badly. Then Frank Churchill, Mr. Weston’s charming son, finally visits Highbury, and Jane Fairfax, the accomplished, reserved niece of the talkative Miss Bates, comes home at the same time. Emma decides she understands what is going on between everyone. She is wrong about nearly all of it.

Through the whole book one person keeps telling her so: Mr. Knightley, the owner of the neighbouring estate, a family friend of long standing, and the most sensible man in Highbury. How that relationship turns out is the novel’s final surprise, at least to Emma.

For the full plot, including the ending, see the Emma summary.

Written at the height of her powers

Austen wrote Emma at Chawton between January 1814 and March 1815, straight off the back of Mansfield Park — fourteen months for her longest and most technically ambitious novel. Where the earlier books were revisions of 1790s drafts, Emma was conceived and executed whole by a novelist in complete command of her instrument.

The technical achievement is the point-of-view discipline. Nearly everything in the novel is filtered through Emma’s confident misreadings: we see Mr. Elton’s gallantry as courtship of Harriet because Emma does; we miss the Frank Churchill–Jane Fairfax engagement because Emma misses it. Austen essentially invented the unreliable third-person narrative — the novel is a detective story in which the reader is gently made an accomplice to the detective’s every wrong deduction.

Main characters

Character	Who they are
Emma Woodhouse	“Handsome, clever, and rich,” twenty, and sure she knows best
Mr. George Knightley	Owner of Donwell Abbey, about thirty-seven, Emma’s friend and critic
Mr. Woodhouse	Emma’s father, gentle, hypochondriac and afraid of draughts, change and wedding cake
Harriet Smith	Emma’s protégée, sweet-natured and easily led
Mr. Elton	The ambitious young vicar of Highbury
Mrs. Elton	The bride Mr. Elton brings back from Bath: vulgar, patronising and unforgettable
Frank Churchill	Mr. Weston’s son, raised by his rich aunt, charming and evasive
Jane Fairfax	Miss Bates’s niece, elegant, gifted and poor, facing life as a governess
Miss Bates	A kind, impoverished, endlessly talkative spinster
Mr. and Mrs. Weston	Emma’s former governess and her new husband, at Randalls
Robert Martin	The farmer who loves Harriet
John and Isabella Knightley	Mr. Knightley’s brother and Emma’s sister, married, with five children

One piece of the family tree confuses readers: Emma’s sister Isabella is married to Mr. Knightley’s younger brother, John. That makes Mr. Knightley a regular visitor at Hartfield and something like a family member, but not Emma’s brother-in-law.

Highbury: where and when it is set

In a letter to her niece Anna, who was trying to write a novel, Austen gave the famous advice that “3 or 4 families in a country village is the very thing to work on.” Emma is that advice carried out. Highbury is a fictional large village in Surrey, about sixteen miles from London, and the novel almost never leaves it. The principal houses are Hartfield, the Woodhouses’ home; Donwell Abbey, Mr. Knightley’s estate; and Randalls, where the Westons live. The social life of the whole book happens within walking distance: the Crown Inn, Ford’s shop, the Bateses’ rooms above a shop, the vicarage.

The novel covers roughly a year, from one autumn to the next, and is set in Austen’s own present, the years just before Waterloo. Its two big excursions, the strawberry party at Donwell and the picnic at Box Hill, are the only times the characters travel anywhere, and both go wrong.

Themes

• Imagination and self-knowledge. Emma’s great fault is not snobbery or unkindness but imagination. She writes stories about her neighbours and then believes them. The novel ends when she learns to read her own feelings as carefully as she thought she read everyone else’s.
• Class and its boundaries. Emma’s reason for detaching Harriet from Robert Martin is rank, and Austen takes it seriously enough to show both what Emma gets wrong and what the village actually believes. Mrs. Elton, meanwhile, is a comic study of new money insisting on its standing.
• Women’s economic lives. Emma, rich, can say she will never marry. Jane Fairfax, equally gifted and poor, faces the “governess trade.” Miss Bates shows where that road leads. Behind the comedy the novel is very clear-eyed about what money does for women.
• Kindness and speech. The book’s moral climax is a single careless joke at a picnic, and Mr. Knightley’s rebuke afterwards. In a village this small, how you speak to people is how you treat them.

The key chapters

Chapter	What happens
1	“Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich”: Miss Taylor’s wedding
7	Harriet asks Emma whether to accept Robert Martin
15	Mr. Elton’s proposal in the carriage on Christmas Eve
26	The Coles’ dinner party and the mysterious pianoforte
38	The ball at the Crown: Mr. Knightley dances with Harriet
43	Box Hill: Emma insults Miss Bates, and Knightley rebukes her
46	A secret engagement is revealed
49	In the garden at Hartfield, a proposal
55	The conclusion: “the perfect happiness of the union”

Publication: a royal complication

Emma appeared in December 1815 from John Murray, the most fashionable publisher in London. The move came with an awkward honor: the Prince Regent — whose dissolute conduct Austen privately deplored — let it be known through his librarian that a dedication would be acceptable. The resulting dedication page is a small masterpiece of doing the minimum: three lines, no praise, the word “permission” doing all the work.

Contemporary reviews were respectful, led by Walter Scott’s substantial (unsigned) notice in the Quarterly Review, which praised the new realism of “the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life.” Sales were solid but not spectacular; Austen’s careful record of opinions among family and friends shows she knew exactly how divisive her heroine was.

Emma on screen

Emma is one of the most-adapted Austen novels, and 1996 alone produced two versions:

• Emma (1972), a six-part BBC serial with Doran Godwin and John Carson. Long, faithful and very much of its era.
• Clueless (1995), Amy Heckerling’s Beverly Hills update with Alicia Silverstone as Cher. The best-known Austen modernisation.
• Emma (1996), the Miramax film with Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeremy Northam. Sunny and romantic.
• Emma (1996, ITV), Andrew Davies’s television film with Kate Beckinsale and Mark Strong. Sharper about class, and a stronger Knightley.
• Emma (2009), a four-part BBC serial with Romola Garai and Jonny Lee Miller, shown in the US on Masterpiece. The most room for Highbury’s supporting cast.
• Emma (2020), Autumn de Wilde’s film with Anya Taylor-Joy and Johnny Flynn. Stylised, funny and the most visually distinctive.

For casts and comparisons, see the Emma characters guide and our ranking of the best Jane Austen adaptations.

Why critics call it her best

Pride and Prejudice is the most loved; Emma is the most admired. Its village constraint — “3 or 4 families in a country village is the very thing to work on” — is total: no London, no Bath, barely a mile of travel, and out of this deliberately tiny canvas Austen builds a complete comedy of class, self-deception, and growing up. If you want to see the novel as a form being perfected, this is the book.

It is also a book that repays a second reading more than any other Austen novel. Once you know the secret the first reading hides, every scene with Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax turns into a different scene, and you can see exactly how Austen laid the clues. The full text is free to read on this site, all 55 chapters. Our guide to Jane Austen’s books in order suggests where it fits in a first reading of the six.