Emma was the last novel which Jane Austen lived to see through the press and is perhaps her most accomplished and representative work, happily combining the qualities for which she has been most praised—irony, wit, realism, vivid characterization, moral seriousness, and faultless control of tone and narrative method. Emma Woodhouse, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, thinks a little too highly of herself, and entertains herself by meddling in the affairs of others. She is blind to her own feelings and dangerously insensitive to the feeling of others. The results are not always to her liking. Though, outwardly the story line of Emma appears to be dealing with the subject of young ladies finding suitable husbands, a close reading of the novel would show that it is much more than that. Within the chosen limits of upper-middle-class society and within even more limited strict feminine point of view for telling the story, Jane Austen is fervently preoccupied with the way the people behave and this is the broad area of the moralist.
Jane Austen (1775-1817) was the daughter of a well-off, cultivated Hampshire clergyman, the Rev. George Austen. She was the sixth in a family of five sons and two daughters. Her main education was from her father. As a child and young woman she read widely, including among novelists, Fielding, Sterne, Richardson, and F. Burney; and among poets, Sir W. Scott, Cowper, and her particular favourite, Crabbe. She began her literary career by writing parodies and sketches for the amusement of her family. Some of these were later worked up into the major novels of her maturity. Her life is notable for its lack of events; although she had several suitors, she did not marry. In 1801 the family moved to Bath, in 1806, after Mr. Austen’s death, to Southampton, and 1809 to Chawton, again in Hampshire, where she lived till her death in 1817.
