Neil Wenborn, Jane Austen: Emma

Emma is Jane Austen’s masterpiece and one of the supreme achievements of English fiction.

Emma is Jane Austen’s masterpiece and one of the supreme achievements of English fiction. Its cast of characters includes some of the author’s most fully realized creations, including the upstanding Mr Knightley, the egregious Mrs Elton and the irrepressibly garrulous Miss Bates. But Emma is dominated above all by the personality of its heroine, Emma Woodhouse, Austen’s portrayal of whom – a masterclass in irony and the management of narrative perspective – is one of the great high-wire acts of English literature. Among the most variously interpreted novels in the language, Emma has been seen as a cautionary tale about the dangers of unregulated imagination, the story of a woman’s humiliation and reform, and a rallying cry of early feminism. This e-book seeks to uncover something of Emma’s extraordinary multivalence through a close reading of the text, setting it in the context of Jane Austen’s life, times and literary heritage and looking at the way it has been read and re-read by critics in the two centuries since it was published.

Neil Wenborn

Neil Wenborn is a freelance writer and publishing consultant and has published widely both in Britain and in the United States. His works include biographies of Haydn, Stravinsky and Dvořák. He is co-editor of the highly respected History Today Companion to British History (Collins & Brown) and A Dictionary of Jewish–Christian Relations (Cambridge University Press). A collection of his poetry, Firedoors, is published by Rockingham Press.

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