One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.
A bildungsroman that follows the life of a rich independent woman named Emma. After her mother’s passing and her sister’s marriage, Emma is left with her father. She successful finds and sets up her governess with a great match. She is a self proclaimed match maker who went on to match people but in the process got hooked up with a glitch or two.
I lay it down as a general rule, Harriet, that if a woman doubts as to whether she should accept a man or not, she certainly ought to refuse him.
Emma is beautiful and rich but spoiled and deluded at times. With match making as her forte she manages to find suitable matches but ruins some. Her meddlesome nature is not liked by many though. Harriet and Robert loves each other. But Emma has other plans for her friend Harrier. Emma thinks Robert is beneath Harriet and this tries to mould Harriet into finding a perfect upper class match. This is where things goes awry for Emma and her so called new found love, “unsolicited matchmaking”.
I cannot make speeches, Emma…If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am. You hear nothing but truth from me. I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it.
In between a lot of turn of events, Emma now struggles with her match. Austen’s speciality is that she does not tell what she thinks about her society or the 19th century England. Rather she shows the niceties of her times through her works and let the readers come to a thought. Emma in a way is fictional but Austen shows the class discrimination prevalent during her times through the depiction of her heroine, Emma. The book is slow paced and you might want to give up in the middle. But for the subtle depiction of English society and the likes in 1815, it’s ok to give it a go.
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