Archive: Emma

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0:43I'm Tristan Redmond, host of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. On arrival, witness accounts described a stabbing in the cockpit of the plane. The Israeli Prime Minister called it an extremely severe security incident, which could be crucial weeks before a general election in Israel. For more, listen to The Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you get your pods. This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme.

1:24Hello. For this week's In Our Time Classic, I've picked Jane Austen's novel Emma, described by Melvin's guests as the author's masterpiece. I first read Emma when it was chosen as a set text for my A-level English. It was also the first novel that I read more than once. And as Melvin's guests agree, one of the greatest pleasures of this magnificent novel is how every reading reveals something new about character, mores and plot. Jane Austen weaves personal ambition, desire, snobbery and instinct on a backcloth of a closed social circle in a small community in Surrey. While the eponymous heroine Emma is vivacious, clever and, let's face it, self-regarding, she slowly learns through mistake after mistake that she must wield her social power with greater care and attention to other people's feelings.

2:23Melvin's guests demonstrate how subtly Austen creates each character, from the slightly pompous but stable and wise Mr Knightley through to the mysterious governess Jane Fairfax and her lover Frank Churchill, who Emma erroneously believes is destined to marry herself. After listening to this episode, characterised by one of the liveliest and most entertaining examples of verbal jousting between Melvin and his guests, I defy you not to want to return to Emma or read it for the first time. Enjoy listening. Hello. At the end of 1815, the great London publisher John Murray brought out a novel by an anonymous writer identified as the author of Pride and Prejudice, etc., etc.

3:10This writer we know to be Jane Austen, and the novel was Emma, described by some of the speakers in our programme today as her masterpiece and by one as the greatest novel written in English. The plot revolves around Emma Woodhouse, described by Austen as a heroine whom no one but myself will much like. Several of the other characters do very much like her, though, in particular, for a while, the conceited vicar Mr Elton, the gentlemanly Mr Knightley, and in his way, the charming Frank Churchill. Emma, meanwhile, tries to reign marriages for her female friends. She claims success for that of her governess and now wants even greater success for the lowly Harriet Smith.

3:46It also takes place in a small Surrey village, a place in which Emma is virtually immured. Her father wouldn't let her leave the place and she has little inclination to displease him. With me to discuss Emma are John Mullen, Professor of English at University College London, Janet Todd, Professor Emerita of Literature at University of Aberdeen and Honorary Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, and Emma Cleary, Professor of English at the University of Southampton. Emma Cleary, to understand Emma better, what do we need to know about Jane Austen's early life? Well, it was around the time that Emma was written and published that Jane Austen began to define her specific field as a novelist.

4:26She wrote to one correspondent, three or four families in a village is the very thing to work on, and to another that she specialised in scenes of domestic life in a country village. And so these were her roots. This is where she came from, what she knew best. And she decided that this is what defined her as a writer. She was born in December 1775 in a small village, Steventon, 16 miles south of Basingstoke. Her father was George Austin, a clergyman, but not a clergyman like Mr Elton in Emma. He was very well educated, cultivated and very hardworking. He was also quite poor and it wasn't quite enough to live off his earnings as a vicar at Steventon.

5:24And so he also on the side ran a boarding school for boys from his own home and did a little bit of farming on the side as well. Her mother, Cassandra, was also very intelligent. She had a dry sense of humour. She had aristocratic connections but was really willing to put her shoulders to the wheel as well. Together they raised six boys and two girls. The boys, well, the oldest one went into the clergy like his father. We don't need to go through all the boys. OK, but it's interesting. I think it will be important later on. Yes, it will. But six is enough to start with at this stage. OK, OK. And in various ways, they influenced her life and her thinking, the careers that they went into.

6:12What had Jane Austen written before Emma? She had written three full novels by the time she was in her mid-twenties in the 1790s. she had drafts or first versions of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey but she didn't have the connections or the savoir-faire somehow to get these works published and so it didn't happen and it wasn't until 1810 that with the help of her brother Henry who was by that time a banker in London she managed to get a contract for Sense and Sensibility As I understood it her parents wrote as well and very much encouraged her. And her father, which had educated her at home, more than anything, gave her access to a very big library.

6:58That's right. Yes, I don't know about a very big library, but certainly a choice library. They were enthusiastic about novels. That was an unusual thing about them. I think her father even read Gothic novels. We've got a record of that in her letters. So it was a very stimulating environment. There were amateur theatricals. There were riddles, games like in Emma. and they were all scribblers. Almost all of them did some form of writing, wrote comic poems or essays. Two of her brothers even ran a journal called The Loiterer for a little while. He died without much money and left Jane Austen and her sister and her mother virtually penniless, saved by one of the six brothers and put in a cottage.

7:41And then she felt she could get on with being a more professional writer. Yes. Well, it took a while still to get established. There were sort of years in the wilderness. Yes, they lived in Bath for a while, the unmarried daughters with their mother and father. And then when the father died in 1805, they moved to Southampton for a little while to live with a sailor brother. and then finally they got to this little house, this cottage in Chawton which was part of the estate of her brother Edward and it's at that point that she took out her manuscript, started to revise them and away she went with her career with Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice in Mansfield Park John Mullen, what reputation did Jane Austen have at the time of Emma's publication?

8:28Well, you read out the title page of Emma by the author of Pride and Prejudice, etc., etc., and Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice in particular, and Mansfield Park as well, to a lesser extent, were quite successful, quite widely admired, quite widely read. She made some money from at least a couple of them anyway. And this sort of body of novels did, I think, had begun to exist in the imagination of a polite reading public. But many of those people would not, most of those people, I think, would not have known who Jane Austen was. It was actually with the publication of Mansfield Park the year before Emma that the secret, if that's the right word, began to leak out.

9:18I mean, her brother Henry started boasting about it. And it's evident that, I mean, it's a famous fact that Emma, when it appeared, was dedicated to the Prince Regent, a man whom Jane Austen abhorred, a dissolute gormand with many mistresses. But he was a fan of her writing and requested her through his librarian to dedicate her next novel to him. So she had begun to acquire a sort of reputation, but not necessarily, I mean, quite a few of those people wouldn't have known who she was. She wouldn't, they certainly wouldn't have known that she was this person in a village in Hampshire. And I think it's quite important comparing Jane Austen to other writers that she knew no other writers.

10:10I mean, she was a member of no circle, no literary circle. There were comical attempts later in her last years to sort of meet a famous person. She thought she might meet George Crabbe. She never did. And this is in the age where, the age of romantic literature, where literary circles are the thing. Everybody hangs out with everybody else. I mean, every writer in Britain meets Coleridge. But even sort of the peasant poet John Clare comes to London and meets other writers. and this extraordinary sense of her work is being read and talked about by friends and acquaintances and members of her family but not other novelists, let alone other major literary figures.

10:50Yet she has, as I learned probably from your notes, she has ambitions to be a literary figure. She has ambitions to make money from her writing. She isn't in it for just the hobby and that's very much part of her intent and she does get some critical attention. She does. Even though that too is a non-existent. She does. I mean, her early fiction gets some good reviews and Emma eventually gets a review by Walter Scott, although he's probably kind of told to do so by John Murray. And it is anonymous. And it is anonymous. But I think, I mean, the first thing you said is absolutely right. Jane Austen, I think there's two important things.

11:30One provable and one my feeling. The provable thing is she cared a great deal about making money. She didn't have much money. Any money that she made from her novels was sort of extra money for her. She didn't have an income. She relied on the charity, in a sense, of her brothers. And so that was very important. But the second thing, I think, is that anybody who steeps themselves in Jane Austen, particularly the novels from Mansfield Park onwards, cannot doubt that she was an artist with really high ambitions. I think she knew she was doing completely new things with fiction. She didn't have anybody...

12:10I think Mansfield Park was the first novel which wasn't, as it were, responding to other people's novels. She was responding to herself from Mansfield Park. Can we just take that on briskly, John? She reworked her... When she started to get published, she reworked some of the earlier novels. Yes. I mean, so it's very important, as Emma says, sense and sensibility, pride and prejudice. We don't have the originals of those, but they were reworked versions of early stuff. Mansfield Park was not. And from Mansfield Park onwards, she is doing entirely new things and she is inventing technical. I mean, you know, people think of her as this sort of beautiful, brilliant, elegant, perfect, but conservative, limited, restrained writer.

12:57Au contraire, I think. She is one of the great experimental writers of European fiction. I'm sure we'll come back to that, John. If I come back to you, I'm sure we'll come back to that. And I can repeat that because, Jan and Todd, for those who haven't read Emma, would you, I'm sorry, but you can be as brisk as you want. It's seven sentences you do it. Well, I think not, actually. Briskly. A summary. Who wants a summary? It's either... You can either do it very, very quickly or you can do it in a great long time. And I should try to be something between... Yeah, brisk, I think. Because it's either about nothing or it's about everything.

13:32It's a fantastic novel. If you start actually describing it, you feel a bit like Mariah Edgeworth saying, well, what is it about? All we know is that, you know, Mr. Woodhouse liked very thin gruel. and what is it about? I think a story would do it, to tell you the truth. Well, I'm trying to do the story. I'm getting there. There's the three or four families in the... I did get the short story in this one. The three or four families in the country village and it's about a community as well as about a character, Emma. It's called Emma and it begins with Emma alone in intellectual solitude, although she's rich, privileged, healthy, only 20 and beautiful.

14:13She is living with a sickly, selfish, foolish, adoring elderly father. And she's just lost her governess and friend. And she is lonely. And she's also bored. Boredom is much discussed in this period. And she seeks a friend and she lights on Harriet Smith, a boarding school girl below her in social status of only 17. and she proposes to train her up to be a friend. She treats her rather like a doll. She says, come and walk, and we walk, and come and stay, and she stays. And Mr Knightley, the neighbouring squire who's been advising her and talking to her since she was a very small child, warns her that this is wrong and that she will do Harriet damage.

15:04And sure enough, she does, because she persuades the girl not to be interested in the very pleasant tenant farmer who's in love with her and who is more on her status, but to go for the rather, well, the very handsome new vicar, Mr Elton. Of course, it turns out that Mr Elton is more interested in Emma and her£30 ,000, and when the mistake is realised in a very, very funny scene, Mr Elton goes off in high dudgeon and comes back with a wife so ridiculous that she is one of the joys of the book. Mrs Elton and her snobbishness and her apparatus of happiness is, I think, to me, a great pleasure. After that, two more people come in.

15:52I am moving along briskly here. First, there is Jane Fairfax, a beautiful orphan of great accomplishments, and Emma is jealous of her. This is the friend she should have had, except that, of course, she wasn't around at the time. But nonetheless, Mr Knightley feels this is the friend she should have had. Emma tries, but Jane is very reserved. And as a result, Emma, who has a great deal of imagination and spirit, invents a back plot for her, which is malicious. She's helped in this by the other visitor to the town, Frank Churchill, a rich young man, whom Emma had always thought dedicated to herself when he finally showed up.

16:33He does come, and they have a very edgy courtship. I am coming to the end. Yeah, you have got all the main characters. And it's this and that and the other, and then they end up with... But it's like a great party. Everybody comes in. It ends up with marriages. It ends up in marriages. It's about marriage very heavily. Ah. No, no, it was very good. It was very good. It was just, you know, I think you'd done it. So that's fine. They all marry the right people. All marry the right people, that's right. Sort of. Exactly.

17:06I enjoyed it. We all enjoyed it. This is written in 1815. Just to put the demarcation in place, Waterloo, things going on, turmoil, revolution, terror, and all that sort of thing. Not a whiff of it. Not a whiff of it. Well, there is a whiff. There's a whiff? There is a whiff. Oh, where's the whiff? Yes, there's a whiff. There's a kind of interesting and maybe ironic or maybe absolutely sincere patriotism in it. It's very clear about England. That's a waft more than a whiff, isn't it, really? No, it's a whiff. But it's about England. It's England versus France. Moderate England. Versus French and their silly language and their ways.

17:49That is very much there. And I think it's also about what is the kind of England that is coming into being. It's an England where things are changing, where people are coming back from the war, the war is over, there's not going to be another war for a long time, how is it going to work? How is it going to work as people go back into positions they should perhaps be holding? Do you think there's much of that there, really? I mean, you're reading deep. It's more about those people you've mentioned and the machinations and intricacies and the evolutions of the plot around the eight or nine of them, isn't it?

18:20Yes, but the people are moving up. The Coles and Mr. Perry are moving up in a social status. And Emma, through whose eyes we mostly look, is worried about it. She doesn't know what to make of it. There are shifting things in the village. And the village is close to London. It feels London pushing against it. An Israel-bound plane was forced to make an emergency landing after an attack on the pilot. So what actually happened on board? I'm Tristan Redman, host of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. On arrival, witness accounts described a stabbing in the cockpit of the plane. The Israeli Prime Minister called it an extremely severe security incident, which could be crucial weeks before a general election in Israel.

19:07For more, listen to the global story on BBC.com or wherever you get your pods.

19:15We've got our own Emma here, Cleary. How does Emma Woodhouse compare to other Austin heroines? Yes, well, she is spotlit by the title. This is the only one of Austen's title which features the heroine. And in doing that, she's sort of highlighting her own daring in creating such an original, such an unusual heroine. Heroines in the proper mould were underdogs. They were Cinderella's. They had to face all sorts of melodramatic trials and tribulations. They were bereaved. They fell into poverty. They had threats to their reputation. They had pursuing villains, seducers. And so all of that was swept aside by the opening paragraph of Emma, which lays down all her advantages, her material, worldly advantages, and insists that nevertheless, this is going to be an interesting person to follow.

20:14But it does highlight a danger in the first chapter. She's facing the danger of intellectual solitude, is the phrase that's used there. And Austen takes that really seriously, and I think that is the sort of driving force of the entire novel, this danger of intellectual solitude, which really is based on the very limited horizons that even a very privileged woman had at that time. She also takes seriously the fact that she fears that no readers will like Emma Pei for herself because she is conceited and snobbish and manipulating and very classist and intolerable in many ways. That's why a lot of readers didn't like her at the time.

20:57Now, you've all marinated into admiration, but at the time... Oh, yes, absolutely. So, I mean, that's another aspect of her experimentalism and her daring. Yeah, but let's stick to the point. She's very snobbish. She's very manipulative. She's very spoiled. This is okay. I mean, this is what she is, though, isn't she? She's mixed. She's mixed. She is intelligent. She's resourceful. She's imaginative. She's funny. She's funny. She's witty, exactly. She's kind. And she's compassionate as well. And she's pragmatic. She has all sorts of good features. She's cruel as well. She's very cruel. So she's warped.

21:38She's warped by these narrow circumstances that she's forced to fit with. I was just going to say, yes, I mean, all these qualities are there, but in a way it's beside the point because we're standing and talking about her as if, you know, we're in our favourite heroine, unfavourite heroine competition. But the point about the novel is it's almost, not entirely, but almost entirely narrated through Emma's consciousness in incredibly sophisticated and funny ways. And so we don't look at Emma. I mean, we do. We do judge her and we're expected to judge her. But also we inhabit her. We see the world through her eyes.

22:16And a lot of the plot things that Jan, I think, brilliantly managed to pack in are things. Some of them are things we see immediately. But some of them, I think, are things that on first reading we don't see immediately because we're seeing the world as Emma sees. And Jane Austen uses this technique which wasn't described until the early 20th century called free and direct style, which she invented, actually. I mean, she invented it and novelists since have sort of used it. And nowadays novelists use it without even thinking about it or knowing what it is, which is to narrate a novel, not in the voice of a character, but through the mind and warping predilections and prejudices of the character.

22:59and that's what she does. And that's why Jane Austen's thing about nobody will like her is a joke. I think it's a joke. I didn't think she minded about it at all. She was laughing about it. Jan, can I come to you about sticking rather obstinately to the character of Emma? Nobody is willing to... It's very strange. She is fictional. You all want to wash... I know, but I'm interested in fictional characters. I'm sure you are, otherwise you wouldn't be here. I mean, the fact is that she's being washed clean all the time. It is... Her snobbery makes you cringe. Her manipulation of Harriet, she's very cruel to Harriet.

23:32She takes Harriet away from a very good marriage and Mr Knightley reprimands her, Emma, for that. She's nasty about the... On Box Hill, she has a spasm of nastiness, a snobbish nastiness. When she rejects Mr Ellen, she says it's partly because he doesn't realise the distance between himself and herself. She's so much higher up the social scale than he is. How dare he even propose to her? Let's get that on the table and then we can move forward. Well, I think you've put it on the table, actually, but I think it is there. I think the cruelty is there, and I think it's there more perhaps than both of you have stressed.

24:06I think there are times when I really found her intolerable. There was one point where Harriet, you know, the simple child, she's only 17, she's had no background at all, sees the Martins again, and it's a very awkward situation. They all like her very, very much in the shop. And she narrates this in a very simple, straightforward way. And Emma is almost moved for a moment. And then it says, but what can you expect from a silly, shallow girl like Harriet? And this is a girl she's taken into her house as supposedly her friend. Things like that I think are almost unforgivable. She's played with her as if she were a doll, really.

24:48Yes, she is. And it goes on. And I think the Box Hill. Yes, of course, she's shadowed by Miss Bates in many ways and she worries about her. But nonetheless, to say something like that in a public place is not acceptable. Emma? I do feel you're exaggerating the dark side of Emma because I think... No, I'm just drawing attention to it. I was about to switch and say that they're a great quality. Yes. Which you can do for me. Okay, that is what I will try to do. She doesn't imagine it. I'll try to make a case for her. I think it's made very apparent to the reader just how constraining, how claustrophobic her circumstances are.

25:27And that really it's through the lack of any options in her life that she is forced into this sort of fantasist role. And I think there's a real feminist agenda, actually, with this novel, which can be seen through an array of female characters. We've got Jane Fairfax, who by rights really should be the heroine of the novel. She was more of the standard heroine. She's an orphan. She has no means. She has no dowry. She's doomed to life as a governess. And she has this extraordinary outburst where she says, you know, the trade in governesses is like the slave trade. You know, she doesn't say it's got the same cruelty involved.

26:11but that nevertheless there's something involuntary and oppressive about it. And one feels fundamentally sympathetic to because she's ruled over by a tyrant. Yes. Her father is either sick or pretends to be sick and he won't let her out of his sight he wants her to eat what he wants her to eat he won't let her go to the place she's never been to London, 15 miles away never been to the seaside and can't go anywhere so she's tyrannised by this man whom she for whom she is what we would now call a devoted carer. And we see this extraordinary forbearance. We see the way she checks what she wants to say.

26:49She tries to compensate for his damaging behaviour to others. I mean, she's absolutely masterful in that. And in different circumstances, if there were an Emma today, she would be a businesswoman. She would be someone showing these extraordinary abilities she had to best advantage. She could go to Oxford, study PPE and become Prime Minister. I think it's John's turn. All right. I mean, yeah, Mr. Woodhouse is, with his habits of gentle selfishness, it's a verbally wonderful novel full of these kind of killing phrases. And he's hilarious. But the thing about Mr. Woodhouse is that in some ways he's the opposite of his daughter.

27:27She thinks that she knows what other people are like. And this is one of the many ways in which, you know, when you're reading it, however awful she sometimes is. There's a bit of most readers that think Emma Woodhouse, c 'est moi, because she's always coming, she's trying to work out what's going on in other people's heads, and that's what makes her interesting, but most of the time she's wrong. He is incapable of thinking that anybody's different from him. So this is an absolute sort of deadly neutralising thing. So he assumes that everybody thinks like him. And, I mean, the most incredible thing about Mr Woodhouse, this sort of valetudinarian, is that he must have had sex at least twice in his life because he's got two daughters.