Jane Austen: 'Emma'

about

“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.

author

Neil Wenborn 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), as well as of the poetry anthology Contourlines: New Responses to Landscape in Word and Image (Salt Publishing). A collection of his poetry, Firedoors, is published by Rockingham Press. Neil Wenborn is the author of Jane Austen: Emma in the Literature Insights series.