Read this if you…
- want a heroine who is way too proud and ends up being wrong a ton
- like the movie clueless
Skip this if you…
- didn't already read Pride and Prejudice (gotta start there)
The 
Take
Emma messing everything up is nice. A way more flawed character than Elizabeth. She really screeed over Harriet the whole time. Loved me Weston being really into diets. Also when Emma made a joke about bates talking too much
The lineage through Emma
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. Emma built on it. - Emma quotes the play outright — "The course of true love never did run smooth" — and jokes that a Hartfield edition of Shakespeare would footnote the line at length - Austen rebuilds the *Dream*'s matchmaking-folly machinery in a Surrey drawing room: same crossed signals, same comeuppance, no fairies required - Reading Lysander's line first reveals Emma's joke — she's betting she can undo Shakespeare's verdict, and the novel is her getting proven wrong
- Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare. Emma built on it. - Emma's self-deceiving misreading of Elton's charade is, scholars argue, Malvolio's letter scene rewritten as comedy of manners - Both characters spin a flattering fantasy out of an ambiguous text and walk into public humiliation for it — Box Hill is Emma's exposure - Knowing how Shakespeare punishes Malvolio's vanity sharpens what Austen is doing to her heroine
Depicted in Art
Colour plate showing Emma sketching Harriet Smith's portrait under Mr. Elton's flattering supervision.
C. E. Brock, 1909
Colour plate from the Box Hill chapters — the picnic party in mid-conversation under the summer sun.
C. E. Brock, 1909
Colour plate of Emma in the Hartfield drawing room with her father, opening the novel's domestic tableau.
C. E. Brock, 1909
Emma and Harriet walking on the Donwell road encounter Robert Martin; Emma scrutinises the farmer she means to dismiss as beneath Harriet.
Hugh Thomson, 1896
Colour plate of the Box Hill outing — the picnic where Emma's insult to Miss Bates breaks the tone of the day.
C. E. Brock, 1909
Recommended Editions
Penguin Classics
2003
Fiona Stafford's Penguin is the easy reading copy. Strong intro on the social world and how Austen's comedic technique actually works, clean annotation, cheap, easy to find.
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Notable Quotes
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
Screen & Stage
looseClueless
Film · 1995
Amy Heckerling
Emma.
Film · 2020
Autumn de Wilde
Emma
TV · 2009
Jim O'Hanlon
Emma
Film · 1996
Douglas McGrath
Posters via The Movie Database (TMDB)
- Virginia Woolf, novelist & critic, 1882–1941: "...the most perfect artist among women, the writer whose books are immortal."
- Sir Walter Scott, novelist & poet, 1771–1832: "Reminds us something of the merits of the Flemish school of painting... finished up to nature, and with a precision which delights the reader."
- Kathleen Turner, actress, 1954–: Chose Emma as her one book on Desert Island Discs (BBC Radio 4, 2000, presented by Sue Lawley).
- Amy Heckerling, film director & screenwriter (Clueless, Fast Times at Ridgemont High), b. 1954: "This is so good, this is so good! Everything in it is just so perfect."
- Harold Bloom, literary critic, Yale University, 1930–2019: "Emma seems the most English of English novels... It is Austen's masterpiece, the largest triumph of her vigorous art."
