Archive: Emma

In Our Time

This In Our Time episode features a scholarly discussion among three literature professors about Jane Austen's 1815 novel Emma. The conversation traces

Key takeaways

• Jane Austen defined her niche early by focusing on 'three or four families in a village,' drawing from her upbringing in Steventon and Chawton.
• Emma Woodhouse is narrated through free indirect style, immersing readers in her consciousness while highlighting her intellectual solitude and social limitations.

Main topics

• Jane Austen's biography and literary development
• Emma Woodhouse character analysis and moral growth

Notable quotes

"a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like."

Conclusion

The episode underscores Emma's enduring relevance through its masterful

Transcript preview

Speaker 7 (0:00) This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Speaker 7 (0:09) Welcome to the Haunted Library. Have you come in search of a tale? This podcast invites you to browse the shelves and find stories that will linger long after you've left this place. From gothic masterpieces to pulpy penny dreadfuls, join me, Colin Morgan, with new episodes twice a week. Find The Haunted Library wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 7 (0:37) What do Beyonce, Steven Spielberg and Cristiano Ronaldo, as well as Paul McCartney, Mr Beast and Roger Federer all have in common? They've all joined one of the world's most exclusive clubs. becoming billionaires. But how did they manage to build such vast fortunes? Find out in Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. The podcast that explores how some of the wealthiest people on the planet made their money. And asks whether they're good, bad or just another billionaire. That's Good Bad Billionaire. Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Speaker 8 (1:10) So, quick summer recap. Speaker 3 (1:12) Heat waves, data leaks, AI hacks, folding phones, and a viral, spinally challenged raccoon. Yeah, Speaker 8 (1:17) I think that covers it, right? I'm Thomas Germain. I'm Speaker 3 (1:21) Jess Maddox, and The Interface is back from its summer break. Speaker 8 (1:24) New season, new co-host, same deep dives into the tech that's shaping our world and our lives. Speaker 3 (1:30) So before AI wipes out all of humanity, Speaker 8 (1:33) allegedly, join Speaker 3 (1:34) us for The Interface. Speaker 8 (1:35) Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 1 (1:43) This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Speaker 1 (2:01) Hello. For this week's In Our Time classic, I've picked Jane Austen's novel Emma, described by Melvin's guests as the author's masterpiece. I first read Emma when it was chosen as a set text for my A-level English. It was also the first novel that I read more than once. And as Melvin's guests agree... one of the greatest pleasures of this magnificent novel is how every reading reveals something new about character, mores and plot. Jane Austen weaves personal ambition, desire, snobbery and instinct on a backcloth of a closed social circle in a small community in Surrey. While the eponymous heroine Emma is vivacious, clever and, let's face it, self-regarding, She slowly learns, through mistake after mistake, that she must wield her social power with greater care and attention to other people's feelings. Melvin's guests demonstrate how subtly Austen creates each character, from the slightly pompous but stable and wise Mr Knightley, through to the mysterious governess Jane Fairfax and her lover Frank Churchill, who Emma erroneously believes is destined to marry herself. After listening to this episode, characterised by one of the liveliest and most entertaining examples of verbal jousting between Melvin and his guests, I defy you not to want to return to Emma or read it for the first time. Enjoy listening. Speaker 1 (3:36) Hello. At the end of Speaker 5 (3:37) 1815, the great London publisher John Murray brought out a novel by an anonymous writer identified as the author of Pride and Prejudice, etc., etc. This writer we know to be Jane Austen, and the novel was Emma, described by some of the speakers in our programme today as her masterpiece and by one as the greatest novel written in English. The plot revolves around Emma Woodhouse, described by Austen as a heroine whom no one but myself will much like. Several of the other characters do very much like her, though, in particular, for a while, the conceited vicar Mr. Elton, the gentlemanly Mr. Knightley, and in his way, the charming Frank Churchill. Emma, meanwhile, tries to reign marriages for her female friends. She claims success for that of her governess, and now wants even greater success for the lowly Harriet Smith. It all takes place in a small Surrey village, a place in which Emma is virtually immured. Her father wouldn't let her leave the place and she has little inclination to displease him. With me to discuss Emma are John Mullen, Professor of English at University College London, Janet Todd, Professor Emerita of Literature, University of Aberdeen and Honorary Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, and Emma Cleary, Professor of English at the University of Southampton. Emma Cleary, to understand Emma better, what do we need to know about Jane Austen's early life? Speaker 6 (4:52) Well, it was around the time that Emma was written and published that Jane Austen began to define her specific field as a novelist. She wrote to one correspondent, three or four families in a village is the very thing to work on, and to another that she specialised in scenes of domestic life in a country village. And so these were her roots. This is where she came from, what she knew best. And she decided that this is what defined her as a writer. She was born in December 1775 in a small village, Steventon, 16 miles south of Basingstoke. Her father was George Austin, a clergyman, but not a clergyman like Mr. Elton in Emma. He was very well educated, cultivated and very hardworking. He was also quite poor. Speaker 6 (5:55) it wasn't quite enough to live off his earnings as a vicar at Steventon. And so he also, on the side, ran a boarding school for boys from his own home and did a little bit of farming on the side as well. Her mother, Cassandra, was also very intelligent. She had a dry sense of humour. She had aristocratic connections, but was really willing to put her shoulders to the wheel as well. Together they raised... They raised six boys and two girls. The boys, well, the oldest one went into the clergy, like his father. You don't need Speaker 5 (6:33) to go through all the boys. Let's go through the girls. Speaker 6 (6:35) OK, but it's interesting. I think it will be important later on. Yes, Speaker 5 (6:39) it will, but six is enough to start with at this stage. OK, Speaker 6 (6:41) OK. And in various ways, they influenced her life and her thinking, the careers that they went into. Speaker 5 (6:48) What had Jane Austen written before Emma? Speaker 6 (6:51) She had written... three full novels by the time she was in her mid-twenties in the 1790s. She had drafts or first versions of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey, but she didn't have the connections or the savoir-faire somehow to get these works published. And so it didn't happen. And it wasn't until 1810 that, with the help of her brother Henry, who was by that time a banker in London, she managed to get a contract for Sense and Sensibility. Speaker 5 (7:25) As I understood it, her parents wrote as well, didn't they? Yes. And very much encouraged her. And her father educated her at home, but more than anything gave her access to a very big library. Speaker 6 (7:34) That's right. Yes, I don't know about a very big library, but certainly a choice library. They were enthusiastic about novels. That was an unusual thing about them. I think her father even read Gothic novels. We've got a record of that in her letters. So it was a very stimulating environment. There were amateur theatricals, there were riddles, games like in Emma. Speaker 6 (7:57) They were all scribblers, you know, but almost all of them did some form of writing, wrote comic poems or essays. Two of her brothers even ran a journal called The Loiterer for a little while. Speaker 5 (8:07) He died without much money and left Jane Austen and her sister and her mother virtually penniless, saved by one of the six brothers and put in a cottage. And then she felt she could get on with being a more professional writer. Speaker 6 (8:22) Yes. Well, it took a while still to get established. There were sort of years in the wilderness. Yes, they lived in Bath for a while, the unmarried daughters with their mother and father. And then when the father died in 1805, they moved to Southampton for a little while to live with a sailor brother. And then finally, they got to this little house, this cottage in Chawton, which was part of the estate of her brother Edward. And it's at that point that she took out her manuscript. started to revise them and away she went with her career with Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park. Speaker 5 (8:59) John Mullen, what reputation did Jane Austen have at the time of Emma's publication? Speaker 2 (9:04) Well, you read out the title page of Emma by the author of Pride and Prejudice, etc, etc. And Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice in particular and Mansfield Park. as well, to a lesser extent, were quite successful, quite widely admired, quite widely read. She made some money from at least a couple of them anyway. And this sort of body of novels did, I think, had begun to exist in the imagination of a polite reading public. But many of those people would not, most of those people, I think, would not have known who Jane Austen was. was. It was actually with the publication of Mansfield Park the year before Emma that the secret, if that's the right word, began to leak out. I mean, her brother Henry started boasting about it. And it's evident that, I mean, it's a famous fact that Emma... when it appeared, was dedicated to the Prince Regent, a man whom Jane Austen abhorred, a dissolute gormand with many mistresses. But he was a fan of her writing and requested her through his librarian to dedicate her next novel to him. So she had begun to acquire a sort of reputation, but not necessarily, I mean, quite a... few of those people wouldn't have known who she was. They certainly wouldn't have known that she was this person in a village in Hampshire. And I think it's quite important, comparing Jane Austen to other writers, that she knew no other writers. I mean, she was a member of no circle, no literary circle. There were comical attempts later in her last years to sort of meet a famous person. She thought she might meet George Crabb. She never did. And this is in the age where, the age of romantic literature, where literary circles are the thing. Everybody hangs out with everybody else. I mean, every writer in Britain meets Coleridge, but even sort of the peasant poet John Clare comes to London and meets other writers. And this extraordinary sense of her work is being read and talked about by friends and acquaintances and members of her family, but not other novelists, let alone other major literary figures. Speaker 5 (11:27) Yet she has, as I learned probably from your notes, she has ambitions to be a literary figure. She has ambitions to make money from her writing. She isn't in it for just the hobby. And that's very much part of her intent. And she does get some critical attention. She does. Even though that too is anonymous. Speaker 2 (11:45) She does. I mean, her early fiction gets some good reviews and Emma eventually gets a review by Walter Scott, although he's probably kind of told to do so by John Murray. And it Speaker 5 (11:58) is anonymous. Speaker 2 (11:59) And it is anonymous. But I think, I mean, the first thing you said is absolutely right. Jane Austen, I think there's two important things. One provable and one my feeling. The provable thing is she cared a great deal about. making money. She didn't have much money. Any money that she made from her novels was sort of extra money for her. She didn't have an income. She relied on the charity, in a sense, of her brothers. And so that was very important. But the second thing, I think, is that anybody who steeps themselves in Jane Austen, particularly the novels from Mansfield Park onwards, cannot doubt that she was an artist with really high ambitions. I think she knew. She was doing completely new things with fiction. She didn't have anybody... I think Mansfield Park was the first novel which wasn't, as it were, responding to other people's novels. She was responding to herself. from Mansfield Park onwards. Can we just Speaker 5 (12:54) take that on briskly, John? She reworked, when she started to get published, she reworked some of the earlier novels. Speaker 2 (13:02) Yes, I mean, so it's very important, as Emma says, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, we don't have the originals of those, but they were reworked versions of early stuff. Mansfield Park was not. And from Mansfield Park onwards, she is doing entirely new things and she is inventing technical. I mean, you know, people think of her as this sort of beautiful, brilliant, elegant, perfect, but conservative, limited, restrained writer. Au contraire, I think. She is one of the great experimental writers of European fiction. I'm Speaker 5 (13:38) sure we'll come back to that, John. If I come back to you, I'm sure we'll come back to that. And I can repeat that because... Jan and Todd, for those who haven't read Emma, would you... I'm sorry, but you can be as brisk as you want. It's seven sentences, you do it. Speaker 4 (13:52) Well, I think not, actually. Speaker 5 (13:55) Brisk? A summary? Who wants a summary? Speaker 4 (13:57) It's either... You can either do it very, very quickly or you can do it in a... Great long time, and I shall try to be something between. Brisk, I think. Because it's either about nothing or it's about everything. It's a fantastic novel. If you start actually describing it, you feel a bit like Maria Edgeworth saying, well, what is it about? All we know is that Mr Woodhouse liked very thin gruel. What is it about? I think a Speaker 5 (14:24) story would do it, to tell you the truth. Well, Speaker 4 (14:25) I'm trying to do the story. I'm getting there. There's the three or four. I did get the short straw in this one. The three or four families in the country village. And it's about a community as well as about a character, Emma. It's called Emma. And it begins with Emma alone in intellectual solitude, although she's rich, privileged, healthy, only 20 and beautiful. She is living with a sickly, selfish, foolish. adoring elderly father. And she's just lost her governess and friend. And she is lonely. And she's