Emma

"You’ve got to have Jane Austen. She’s the first serious novelist. She is treating the novel in a way that we understand and creating an art form. I chose Emma . It would have been easier to choose Pride and Prejudice because it’s everyone’s favourite—it tops polls regularly. But if you want something a little bit more considered… It’s the most mature of the seven. I also happen to think the character of Emma is delightful and fascinating. She has all of the classic Austen heroine characteristics but, at the same time, she’s a bit more than that. She seems almost modern. You can imagine having a conversation with her on a train or a bus. You couldn’t necessarily imagine doing that with someone like Anne Elliot in Persuasion . It’s also a book that I first read when I was at school, so it’s a personal favourite. That’s the other thing we have to acknowledge: All these lists are faintly ludicrous–more than faintly. It’s bound to reflect a lot of personal bias and Emma was the first one that I ever read so it brings back happy memories. Yes, every single one of the books on this list has been. Some of them rather patchily. For example, a book like Tropic of Cancer just about scrapes in. It’s quite hard to find but it is in print. All the others are. Some of them have been through lots of different editions: Gulliver’s Travels has been published for children, for teenagers, as a political book and so on. It’s got many different forms and it’s endlessly being republished. The Folio Society couldn’t exist without that kind of book. Yes I quite agree. Well, one thing that’s certainly true is that women read fiction more than men. If you ask any publisher they’ll tell you that the people that buy their books are women by ratio of two to one. You can’t really succeed in fiction if you aren’t appealing to a good chunk of women. Yes, they are rom-coms aren’t they? Hmm, what should you read? The Good Soldier —that’ll put you straight! Getting married is a big plotline but Austen is also about village life isn’t it? It’s about families."

"Emma is great fun, I’ve taught that over and over too. Undergraduate students tend not to like it, because the young women I have taught, mostly at élite institutions, have by and large been brought up with a very precise code of conduct. The first thing they all know is that they aren’t supposed to take themselves too seriously, they aren’t supposed to brag about themselves, and so on. Emma is extremely cocky; she believes that she is right in all her judgements. She is happy to make judgements about other people and if they’re wrong she briefly repents but tends to go on and do the same thing again. The undergraduates don’t understand why she should be taken seriously and why she should be rewarded – from their point of view she should be punished for behaving the way she does. So it’s always a delight to be able to show, textually, how extremely serious Emma really is, and how seriously she thinks about ethical matters. There is a lot of language in the book about how thoughtful she is of other people, how conscientious she is, of course, in taking care of her father. But also how conscious she is, most of the time, about not offending Miss Bates, about pleasing Miss Bates. She is generous, she is caring, she is really benevolent in impulse, all of which makes it the more shocking when she allows herself to insult Miss Bates. Miss Bates says something about saying a foolish thing, and Emma says, with great superficial politeness: ‘Ah, but the difficulty will be saying only one such thing.’ And the wonderful thing about that insult is that the reader is led on, the reader is likely to be with her all the way. We have heard Miss Bates saying foolish things one after another. Emma’s comment seems a witty and appropriate thing to say – and then, of course, we are forced to realise, what a terrible thing it is to say, right along with Emma; we’re chastened along with her. “I would say Persuasion is the best of Jane Austen’s novels.” The other thing that fascinates me about Emma – Austen plays this trick in other novels too, but not nearly as much as in Emma – is the degree to which she can report the most tedious possible speech and make you enjoy it. It’s not only Miss Bates nattering on and on, but there’s also a wonderful dinner-table scene where Emma’s father and her sister are talking about their respective apothecaries. It is just the essence of boredom – if you were sitting in that room, you would go crazy with boredom, and she somehow manages to make it hilariously funny. It’s pure genius. It’s a great book. I taught a faculty seminar on Emma at the National Humanities Center a few years ago. We spent two weeks and four hours a day on it. The members of the seminar were assistant professors who were themselves teaching Emma in their classes – they had all taught it repeatedly. We had the most wonderful time, and together discovered so many new things. Everybody thought at the beginning that they knew all about Emma , and by the end, they realised that there was a lot more to know…"

"Emma is the Regency novel in the sense that it was written and published during the Regency. I think the feel of much of Jane Austen is really in the late 1790s – the beginning of the French Wars. Jane Austen wasn’t writing about politics. She is famously someone who writes about what she knows. Her world is essentially a provincial world of manners. It is a comic novel about becoming morally mature. Yes, she does. And the book looks at the choices that people must make in order to become mature. She looks at the social order and how it works. It really couldn’t be further away from the kind of lonely alpine world of Frankenstein and the imaginary mindscape she lays out. Jane Austen’s genius is to write brilliantly about the world she lives in. She is a realist and I think she needs to be included. Well, I think she does. She is drawing on the world she knows, which is the world of the provinces rather than the metropolis or the government. In Emma you come across the provincial gentry and the yeoman class. Austen is well aware of the money coming in from the wars and has a very good grasp of local economy, which is reflected in the book. Yes, that’s exactly it – and to write about it with genius."