Over the last four weeks I’ve discovered the perfect combination of comforts for surviving lockdown: chocolate and Jane Austen – specifically Emma, her fourth published work and arguably her best novel.
Yet even with nothing else to do, I didn’t have the time or energy to reread the book itself, so I made do with all five adaptations of the story, from the BBC’s miniseries in 1972, the Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle in 1996, the second BBC adaption to come out that same year, their third televised attempt in 2009, and Autumn de Wilde’s interpretation of early 2020.
The story certainly knows how to time itself, averaging one (nearly) every decade, at (rough) ten year intervals.
I’ve often believed that the reason Emma and Pride and Prejudice are over-represented in media is due to the fact Elizabeth and Emma are spirited in a way the ladies of Mansfield Park and Persuasion aren’t. Austen was saying something very different about social expectations and personal fortitude in her treatment of Anne Elliot and Fanny Price, which has inevitably led to screenwriters finding them “less fun”... but perhaps not entirely without reason.
Elizabeth and Emma are more dynamic characters; they are different women at the end of their stories than they were at the beginning. It’s perhaps due to the internal change required of its main character that Emma is generally considered Austen’s finest work (even if Pride and Prejudice remains her most beloved) with a protagonist that is deeply flawed yet all the more lovable for it.
According to Austen herself: "I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like", and yet we do like Emma – not in spite of her faults, but because of them. Her snobbery, her meddling, her foolishness – it’s all so entertaining that it’s almost disappointing when she grows out of it.
Austen also deserves credit for taking the familiar beats of a romance novel and turning them inside out. In any other story it’s beautiful, impoverished and musically gifted Jane Fairfax who would be our protagonist, with Frank as the dashing, unpredictable love interest who promises to save her from a life of destitution if only she can endure the secrecy that’s required to survive his formidable aunt.
Emma stands in ignorance of the drama happening right under her nose, never doubting that she’s the main character but not realizing the point of her arc is to realize how wrong she is about everything, and that her true love isn’t the charming, enigmatic Frank but George Knightley: old family friend, next door neighbour and technical brother-in-law.
All of Emma’s matchmaking attempts end in disaster, she completely misinterprets Mr Elton and Frank Churchill, and is completely wrong about everything. She’s… dare I say… clueless?
Emma Woodhouse is also unique for being the only one of Austen’s heroines who is under no familial, financial or even societal pressure to marry. She has no need to worry about her well-being or that of her family, and her father's desire to keep her close only increases her power. She can do whatever she likes, and so when she does eventually wed, it’s entirely because she wants to.
It gives the book a lightness of spirit that’s missing from her other works, in which Elizabeth, Anne, Elinor and Marianne have to actually worry about their futures and financial situations, and I suspect that’s another part of the reason why Emma has been adapted so often. So many readers – rightly or wrongly – look upon Austen as escapism, and as such Emma’s complete lack of poverty or long-term worry becomes the most appealing aspect of her story.
