@Mithical Austen said, while writing Emma, that she had taken on a heroine “whom nobody but myself will very much like”, IIRC

🎶How d’you solve a

problem like ‘Em-maaaa”🎵

Didja read the answer past the spoiler alert, then?

Also, I do like Emma (the character). I identify with her. Or at least, I think I was just as blindly arrogant at her age. And I really like the novel. I think it's easily Austen's best. Well, I might be able to make a case for Persuasion (I think @GarethRees likes that one). I can see why people like P&P. I'm always baffled by those who claim to like Mansfield Park best; it is to my mind the one Austen novel that comes precariously close to being a bore.

I even like Lady Susan better (and it was made into a very funny move called, inexplicably, Love and Friendship). MP and Northanger Abbey are the two Austen novels I'm most disinclined to re-read (though I have read each more than once).

Not only Austen's best, I think Emma is one of the great masterpieces of the English novel.

@verbose yes, I'm not one for avoiding spoilers. I like being able to catch foreshadowing

@Mithical oh ah

The thing though is that Emma is so nearly right. There is more to the story than just that Jane is ill. Jane is being cagey and noncommittal about Weymouth because she's concealing a love affair there. Emma just draws the wrong conclusions because she's a romantic (she thinks that because Mr Dixon saved Jane from falling overboard, that must have led to their being in love) and because her own wishes mislead her.

And it's not entirely her own fault. Jane's circumstances are the inverse of Emma's: poor family, but given education enough for her talents to thrive. Emma is rich, but Chapter 1 tells us that Miss Taylor / Mrs Weston was not as intelligent as Emma, and while a lovely person, couldn't really train / govern her enough to ensure that her talents reached their full potential.

What is a lively, witty nineteen-year-old girl to do in a tiny village in Regency England, when she has never been given the discipline to apply herself? Emma, poor thing, has no chance. Her father and Miss Taylor have done her no favors.

So she squanders her intelligence on stupid things like matchmaking and invening romances out of whole cloth.

This is what I mean: one can dislike Emma, one can love her, one can pity her, one can be horrified by her behavior and the damage it inflicts on others. That shows what a complex creation she is.

And on the one hand, it's easy to see how Emma views matters only in relation to herself. On the other hand, everybody in Highbury views everything only in relaionship to Emma! And the novel too is structured so that everything is about Emma. Jane is a fully developed character toom but structurally, she is so neatly Emma's inverse, there is art in how well that works. Likewise Emma's other foils: Mrs Elton, Harriet, even Isabella, are all distorting mirrors that reflect Emma back to herself

Not just because Emma is narcissistic (which she is) but because the novel is structured that way. By thinking about those characters, we learn about Emma, but they aren't just puppets, they seem fully realized in their own right—yet they're just Emma in disguise.

It's just brilliant how well that works. Emma is absolutely one of the greatest novels ever written, or at least one of the greatest I've read. Yes, Middlemarch is ... Middlemarch. It's hard for any novel not to be thrown completely into the shade by Middlemarch. But fuck me if Emma doesn't come pretty close to retaining its light anyway.

About the brilliant construction: Emma assumes that his rescuing her from peril means that Jane must be in love with Mr Dixon. She makes exactly the same mistake about Harriet later. Harriet says someone rescued her, Emma leaps to the wrong conclusion about whom and what Harriet means. Such nifty little delights of construction abound in that novel, where structurally the same incidents recur over and over again, except we don't actually notice because the story doesn't seem contrived at all.

k I'll shut up about Emma now

I typed, then refrained from posting, a comment to this answer of mine. The comment read thusly:

As an aside, I'd invite you to re-read and revise your prior questions about Romanticism; some of them have received no answers because they are framed very broadly while simultaneously using terms that have very specific meanings. They are unanswerable as asked.

But I'm worried that I was mean enough in the answer and posting such a comment would just make the OP [sm]ad. Can someone help me put this to the OP more tactfully—or maybe even themself put it tactfully to the OP?

Also, I should prolly type up a meta post saying "we need a close vote reason that says 'too broad for this forum'". That is not the same thing as "unclear what you're asking" or "open-ended list". A question like this one is so broad as to be meaningless. There is no way to give a satisfactory answer, because one would have to begin by questioning the premises, then by delving into detailed literary history.

It's the equivalent of asking "How has Shakespeare influenced subsequent literature?" Not answerable. Not because Shakespeare hasn't influenced literature, it's because the question is ... just too fucking broad. Entire libraries.

Golly, I've been chatting away to myself. Where is everybody?

@verbose I'm here, but Jane Austen is unfamiliar to me.

@b_jonas a world of delight awaits you, then. I suggest starting out with Pride and Prejudice, it's the funnest.

@verbose It's a style of analysis that constructs its own difficulties. It treats the opinions of the representatives of a movement as if they were the opinions of a single person, so that all the opinions of Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, etc. are attributed to "Romanticism", thus creating the impression of a puzzle because the "Romanticism" so constructed has contradictory opinions. But really there is no puzzle because there is no such person as "Romanticism".

But having written that, I'm not sure that these questions should be closed, because this is a common style of thought and so it is possible that someone thinking in the same way could come up with the kind of answer that the OP wants.

The OP's questions are similar to those that arise when you treat fiction as if it were documentary, where you end up with questions like, "how many children did Lady Macbeth have?" or "how many eyes did Polyphemus have?". These questions admit both "in-universe" and "out of universe" answers.

@verbose that used to be a meaning of "too broad", before they changed it to be only "multiple questions"

Shakespeare was Shakespeare