If my memory is correct, I first read Emma the summer before my sophomore year of high school, which should be the summer of 1998. I remember this partly because I was excited to see that our theatre department was doing a stage adaptation of Emma as the fall play. It was one of the first shows I worked on in my high school theatre department, despite having taken the freshman drama class the previous school year, and I made props. These factors combined to make Emma my favorite Jane Austen book.

December 2023: I'm re-reading Emma as part of my Jane Austen read-through. ( )

Quick Thoughts

1. My favourite Jane Austen book.
2. Emma was a great character. She wasn't looking for love or marriage and that made her cool to me.
3. I was never sure who she was going to end up with. It should have been obvious but it wasn't to me.
4. I found this book easier to read than some of her others.
5. Just an excellent book. ( )

4th. Finally a female with some power--usually Austen's heroines suffer heroically (and silently). But Emma misuses her power, so she is the one causing the hardships. ( )

Paused ~ 40%

I really want to read this, but I’m currently not in the mood. I’ll come back to this another time, probably in audiobook format instead.

I liked this book a lot and I think anyone who likes Jane Austen should read this book because she never fails to bring a really interesting love story into her novels. ( )

Wow! This was my first full foray into Austen. I have started Sense and Sensibility several times, and watched the beginning scenes of adaptations of it and Pride and Prejudice but never seemed to get further than that.
Why has it taken me so long to get here? Emma is probably the most interesting and complex female lead I have ever read.
This book showed me how bad I am with names, as I only started remembering exactly who all of the Knightleys and Westons and Churchills and Eltons really were about a third of the way in. But once I had a clear cerebral image of who everyone was it was hard to put down. Lovely characters, unexpected happenings, charming details and just the right average chapter length. I honestly can't wait to read this again to pick up all the little hints for what was really going on with all of the characters. ( )

3.5/5 The first half was good, but the second was not that interesting with few exceptions. ( )

Emma is so funny and iconic. Honestly, I laughed out loud so much during this book. ( )

I'm going to start with this - I didn't like this book. The characters small and annoying, too much gossip, and its missing the humor of "Pride and Prejudice".

However, I'm glad I read it. This book gives you an inside view of a small village in England, where travel is hard (20 miles is a long way), the residents know each other too well, and that anyone new in town requires week of gossip. I also appreciated just how important important manners and suitability matter - one small misstep can cost you a marriage proposal and doom you to spinsterhood.

The characters are annoying because they have no outlet to be otherwise. To be seen as different will mark you for the rest of your life. Gossip is used as a way to assess character fitness in others, just knowing that you will be the talk of the town is enough to keep you in line.

As for Emma, she's bored. Only kept at home by her father, who doesn't want her to marry, only allowed certain outlets appropriate to women of a certain class (and she sits at the top in her small village), never allowed to grow. Of course she'll be annoying and in everyone's business, she has nothing better to do.

So ultimately, this book isn't one I enjoyed reading, and at times, I had to push myself to read through. I won't be rereading it, but I am glad I pushed through it because it showed just how stifled small village life is, for both Women and Men in Georgian Era England. ( )

It’s rather surprising that I haven’t read ‘Emma’ before. Although I’ve never made a systematic effort to read Classic British Literature, Clueless is one of my favourite films of all time and I realise now that it’s impressively loyal to the spirit of the book. What spurred me to finally read it was a recommendation from a friend that it’s a good portrait of female friendship. (In general, I’m not willing to read books based only on the judgement of posterity and prefer to get a more specific recommendation.) This proved to be very true and I loved the complex dynamics of Emma’s relationships with Harriet, Jane, her sister, her former governess, Miss Bates, and Mrs Elton. The whole novel concentrates on these relationships between women, while male-female relationships are seen predominantly through the frame of how women talk about them to one another. The class dynamics are also portrayed with great nuance and insight.

I found, as with [b:Pride and Prejudice|1885|Pride and Prejudice|Jane Austen|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320399351s/1885.jpg|3060926], that classifying Austen as romance is inaccurate and unfair. Both are very witty family dramas, centred on fascinating female characters. Emma herself is a wonderful creation and effortlessly involves the reader in seemingly asinine details of her life. Her intelligence is clearly in need of some better outlet than rural gossip, although a great deal of her energy goes into caring for her kind yet querulous father. The scenes between father and daughter were very moving, as they reminded me of my late grandparents. I also very much liked the fact that Emma eventually marries her closest male friend, even if this does mean a weakening of her friendship with Harriet. The fact that he claims to have fallen in love with her when she was thirteen is creepy, however. There must not be anything remotely original left to say about Jane Austen novels, but it's still worth noting that the dialogue is absolutely magnificent, something I greatly value in any novel. Also, I felt it much in Austen’s spirit that the Penguin Classic I read had this wonderful typo: Mrs. Elton ‘return[ed] a letter to the purple and gold ridicule by her side’. I presume it was actually a reticule; the malapropism couldn’t have happened to a more fitting character. All things considered, an excellent novel to read on the sofa during a World Cup final. ( )

Most classic lovers would have already read Jane Austen's Emma. This edition, however, isn't just for new readers but for collectors. It takes the evergreen story by Jane Austen and presents in a beautiful new packaging. The overall effect is so compelling that it will be tough to resist purchasing this book, especially as the story is unabridged and hence will retain its original appeal.

The cover itself indicates how beautiful the inner content of this book will be. Every single chapter is embellished with a distinct flower, with it appearing like a floral crown on the dropped capital of the first letter of the chapter and then randomly across the rest of the pages of that chapter. With a new chapter, the flower changes. The result is a floral extravaganza with the fragrance being provided by Jane Austen's everlasting story.
I just wish the font used would have been something other than the typical Times New Roman. I understand that the classic novels were printed using this typeface but it looks plain next to the beautiful flowers.

But it's still a gorgeous book and worth adding to your collection.


I received an advance review copy of the book for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.


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Join me on the Facebook group, Readers Forever!, for more reviews, book-related discussions and fun. ( )

Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken. ( )

New edition, umpteenth re-read. I love all the little details I'm still catching, like the Eltons sending their carriage for Miss Bates and Jane Fairfax - who live across the road from the Crown Inn! Still skipping Frank's letter and speed-reading through the final chapters, though ( )

I originally read Emma 35 years ago. I enjoyed it even more this time..I listened to it on audio book. It was an outstanding performance! ( )

I've read Pride & Prejudice and Persuasion, both of which I really enjoyed, but I just could not get into Emma. To put it bluntly, bat s**t boring. Didn't even finish. ( )

The rigid class snobbery is perfectly designed to annoy the feck out of me, but I have to admit it’s a pretty smashing book. ( )

While overall a good book, I found it incredibly longwinded. After about 20 chapters, I switched to consuming it as an audiobook, which I enjoyed more - in fact, I find it might be the best way to consume it, as it truly serves to immerse one more. Still, I would had preferred it to be a bit shorter. Emma is a character I still do not have a full grasp on, even after over 50 chapters, which I think is a shame. However, it is very skillfully written. ( )

I've loved this book for a long time, but rereading it last week, I almost dropped it when Mr. Knightley tells Emma he's been in love with her since she was 13. He would've been 29 when she was 13. Ugh. I know, I know, it was a different time, but still. CREEPY. Somehow in the years since I last read Emma, Mr. Knightley had become in my imagination a nearly decent 30 years old. He's only 10 years older than Emma, right? No, no. Watch yourself, people. When you start romanticizing romances you know you've lost your edge.

Okay. What I'll tell myself is that Mr. Knightley was in love with teenage Emma in a totally pure way. Like in that movie Beautiful Girls where Timothy Hutton thinks a young Natalie Portman is a really great kid and wishes he could wait ten years and marry her because she's so cool. Yeah, that's more okay. I guess it's all okay. Of all of Austen's books that I've read, Emma is the one where the two romantic leads spend the most time together actually falling in love. So there's that. ( )

This story is a lot of fun and continues to hold up well on every re-read. Emma is perhaps the most realistic of Austen's protagonists - a wealthy young woman who has always been the biggest fish in her little pond, spoiled, vain, arrogant, and petty. But she means well, and eventually matures as she makes blunder after blunder, not learning from the first mistake, or even the second, but she gets there in the end.

This story also features two of my favorite fictional characters - Mr. and Mrs. Elton, who thoroughly deserve one another.

Audiobook, borrowed from my public library. Nadia May's narration is outstanding. ( )

Speaking of rereading classics over and over again, I remember reading the following in one of the many book blogs I follow (so I forgot which one): "Oh, I need to read Anna Karenina again, I need to check how Anna and Vronsky and everyone else are doing..."

After finishing a disappointing book, I went and stared at my bookshelves... and felt like checking how Emma and Mr Woodhouse are doing, now that Miss Taylor is married :)

You do not read the same book when you reread, of course. Your mood is different, you have had new experiences, you notice different things.

This time, I thought about...

...what a tyrant Mr Woodhouse is. Kind, loving, vulnerable, but a tyrant nonetheless. Emma's character is too strong for her become completely codependent, but you can see that she is.

..."Emma" as a mystery novel. There is the mystery of Mr Elton, of Mr Frank Churchill, of Jane Fairfax, of Mr Knightley. It is wonderful to see how skillfully and subtly Jane Austen scatters the clues on the pages.

...how well-written the dialogues are. I can hear the characters' voices.

...Miss Bates' stream of consciousness speeches. Lovely.

...the fact that one important reason for Emma to become friends with Harriet is TO BE ABLE TO LEAVE THE HOUSE. Respectable young women should not walk alone, right? Grrr.

...the exquisite writing. ( )

I had only seen bits of TV adaptations of this, but wanted to read the book before watching one through. So I had some idea of a few key incidents but not the whole story. In the event, I thoroughly enjoyed this, with the various machinations of Emma, the misunderstandings and blunders, and the way she is gradually educated by life. I can only (figuratively) cheer as the well-deserved happy ending arrives for the various characters and have retained this for future re-reads, which I seldom do these days.

A well deserved five star rating. ( )

It occurred to me that the death of Mrs Churchill is Very Suspicious.

1. Just after Frank arrives
2. Nobody believed she was that ill
3. Her objections to Frank's marriage necessitated the secret engagement
4. Which was becoming insupportable when Emma got involved

I think Foul Play was involved. I wouldn't put it past that Frank Churchill, the cad. I almost want a different version of the book where Emma's little grey cells get to work, and she conducts an investigation, bringing Frank to justice (after a horseback chase across the heath) and saving Jane Fairfax from an awful fate. Problem: Emma would be the world's worst detective, being consistently wrong about everything.

Nevertheless others seem to have also dreamed up the idea of a "Woodhouse Investigations" series (Jane would be her loyal research assistant, and she'd be far too busy solving crimes to marry poor Knightley). Search for "Jane Austen mysteries"; there are dozens. ( )

Slow. Like walking in mud. ( )

Reading this straight after Pride and Prejudice I was really surprised how I didn't like this much. I'm not sure how much of that was just too much Austen at once or some general mood thing, but for me the lightness that I loved in Austen was mostly absent and it just felt quite tedious. Until the end I was thinking maybe a 3 - I was not greatly entertained, but there was enough to keep me reading, but a key thing about the ending I found really infuriating. Obviously this is just personal enjoyment rating not a comment on her writing skill etc

Trying to break it down why it didn't catch my attention:

1) Length. I think it was about 50% longer, which seems like not much, but the extension mostly seemed to give space to pretty tedious stretching out of commonplace things. Several characters appear to have their main character trait as "talking a lot but not saying anything". Emma's father is a hypochondriac, which gives some humour at first but over time just means every time he's mentioned, even in the smallest way, means several paragraphs of reassuring him over some new invented health issue. Lots of little irrelevant things are gone over too much. Some of the later reveals are guessable very very early, which makes the prevaricating and nobody else noticing extra tedious. Obviously Frank and Jane have some kind of involvement, from near the first time he arrives! The way they behave with each other speaks very clearly to some history! But nobody even gets a hint of it to the end
2) Less humour, or it not landing as well. Both talking too much (2 characters, at least, have this as their main focus) and being a hypochondriac are clearly supposed to be funny and to an extent they are but after a while you become as irritated with them as others in the book are. The first volume at least has a clear somewhat comedic plotline focused around Emma being extraordinarily dense and misunderstanding quite obvious cues in her focus on Harriet but afterwards that plot line disappears, pretty much.
3) Weird focus - there are 4 relationships started in the book, and in all of them we barely see the actual romancing part, or fully understand why they like each other The Eltons are obviously not a role model couple and the main interest is clearly money on his part, but it's unclear why she was interested. The Jane Fairfax-Frank Churchill connection is started off screen and he spends most of his time in the book treating her terribly, so much so that she breaks off the engagement before everything is "fixed". Harriet - Martin is reliant on a bit of reported speech near the start that you're supposed to carry through the whole book and think both were still fixated on it a year later. Emma and Knightley apparently developed almost all their fondness for each other before the book - Knightley's actually surprisingly absent from a lot of the book, and almost all his conversations with Emma are reproaches or warnings. It feels weird for a romance book, and makes the ending feel flatter. The story of Emma trying to mould Harriet takes up most of Volume 1, then Harriet appears a lot but is basically irrelevant to almost anything (and never says anything) until the end.

The thing that actually really frustrated me when I reached it was near the ending, when Emma has her Revelation and she completely rethinks in an instant how she'd seen Harriet - and it feels both incredibly cruel but also from a reader perspective it feels bizarre it ever happened Emma is shown many times to be VERY conscious of minor social distinctions, being willing to engage with the *slightly* lower parts of society but always only as enlightened condescension on her part. Mrs Weston seems mostly excused due to her being her governess and then marrying quite well. She wants to refuse invitations from a family of newer wealth until she realises she'd miss out on a nice party. She's concerned always about connections and respect and status and money, in the way a good upper class woman should be.

So why on earth was she so fixated on Harriet? There is no real explanation in the book. The explanation that seemed obvious to me - she merely wanted someone pliable and submissive in a way other people of her status and upbringing wouldn't be - was never, as far as I remember, mentioned, even though it'd be a worthy part of her self-examination at the main part of the book. Harriet is an illegitimate child from an unknown family who was dumped at a minor boarding school for girls of no special status. Emma decides, based on nothing except that her schooling is being paid for, that her father must be a respectable person from the upper class. This is what drives her schemes throughout volume 1. Yet she knows full well that, being someone with no known parentage and of illegitimate birth, she would always be highly unlikely to get married to someone respectable - even if her parentage were revealed.

In the final self reflection and revelation of her feelings, she says this. But even more than that - she utterly rejects her friendship with Harriet on any level! Her status and breeding were so minor it was absurd she should ever have even tried to be friendly with her. It feels shockingly cruel in a bit intended to show she's working to fix her faults and instantly poisoned me against her. But more than that, to a reader it makes the whole thing feel like a shaggy dog story. Of course, if she felt that at the start of the book there would have been much less of a story. But avoiding any explanation, having spent the whole book showing it against her character, felt incredibly frustrating. In a book where I'm forced to attend to bizarrely minor differences in status to understand it, how was this apparently completely unsuitable friendship encouraged and allowed and... ugh I don't understand it at all

I think too it reveals how little Austen can imagine of the interior lives of people even only a bit below her in status. She can't imagine her being anything other than very easily led, with barely any feelings of her own. She does show Harriet pining after Elton for a longer time, but because we only see this through Emma's point of view for most of it and Emma has already been shown to be completely wrong and oblivious, I was shocked at the one scene where Harriet does speak and pulls out a couple of silly keepsakes of him to burn them. The scene which causes Emma's revelation is Harriet reacting to somewhat misleading signals from Mr Knightley as expressions of interest. Her reaction is understandable yet obviously again this is treated as absurd.

I did read the annotated version for like half of this, which had some useful information about the era but didn't give much of a hint of some of my issues story wise.

Overall I was disappointed - less of the incredible humour I loved in Pride and Prejudice, more of Austen's own snobbery, too much tedium. ( )

Rereading this along with the Jane Austen biography.

A good read the second time around, though I felt the last 1/4 had lots of repetition and needed some cutting down. ( )