The disruption of the picturesque in this passage may suggest the advocacy of a less idealized view of life, but ironically, the apparent emphasis on comic realism is dependent on the reader appreciating both the convention that is being upset and the alternative with which it is juxtaposed.

The evocations of different artistic styles work in much the same way as the puns – teasing the reader with suggested likenesses which are only to be undermined by contradiction and uncertainty. For no sooner has Harriet’s adventure been interpreted as comic than Emma’s very different reading is presented, which sees the episode not as picturesque or burlesque, but as romantic. For Emma, the gypsies are no more than a device to bring together the hero and heroine – ‘a fine young man and a lovely young woman thrown together in such a way’ – for the self-styled ‘imaginist’ the possibilities are irresistible. And yet, as Emma re-creates the incident for others, it is transformed into yet another literary kind:

In her imagination it maintained its ground, and Henry and John were still asking every day for the story of Harriet and the gipsies, and still tenaciously setting her right if she varied in the slightest particular from the original recital.

The rapid generic shifting is also mirrored in the prose itself, which similarly startles the reader through its protean refusal to maintain a consistent voice or tone. If the visual scenes are disrupted by the sudden introduction of an unexpected element, so the third person narrative is persistently broken by free indirect style, dialogue, quotations and letters. At times dialogue becomes dramatic monologue, the speeches (especially those of Mrs Elton or Miss Bates) running on for more than a page of breathless hyphenated excitement. In other scenes, the more staccato exchanges seem closer to drama, especially in the first edition where the page layout allows only eight words to a line.28 There are even stage directions:

‘Well, Miss Woodhouse, (with a gentle sigh,) what do you think of her? – Is not she very charming?’

There was a little hesitation in Emma’s answer.

‘Oh! yes – very – a very pleasing young woman.’

‘I think her beautiful, quite beautiful.’

‘Very nicely dressed, indeed; a remarkably elegant gown.’

‘I am not at all surprized that he should have fallen in love.’

‘Oh! no – there is nothing, to surprize one at all. – A pretty fortune; and she came in his way.’

Nor are the departures from the linear narrative always as clear cut as this; very often a quasi-Johnsonian aphorism will slide almost imperceptibly into interior monologue (‘Perfect happiness, even in memory, is not common; and there were two points on which she was not quite easy’), while much of the apparently omniscient narration reflects the views and prejudices of the eponymous heroine. Indeed, many of the novel’s minor characters never appear at all, while those who do are not given direct speech. The reader becomes familiar with an extraordinary range of figures – William Larkins, the Miss Coxes, the Campbells and the Dixons, Mrs Hodges, Serle, the Churchills, Miss Nash, the Sucklings, Mr Wingfield, James and Hannah – without any description from the narrator.29 Even Mr Perry, who seems an almost ubiquitous presence in High-bury, lives only in the thoughts and dialogue of the major speaking characters, and when at last he appears in person, he is hardly centre-stage: ‘As they were turning into the grounds, Mr Perry passed by on horseback. The gentlemen spoke of his horse.’

Throughout the novel, the reader is both comforted with the illusion of a cosy rural community of familiar figures, and unsettled by the realization that these figures have been constructed by the individual imagination, working only with hints from other fictional characters.

The difficulty of connecting the language to a particular source is part of the persistent exploration of the nature of reading, and the gentle exposure of the reader’s limited understanding of the novel. Among the most obvious disruptions to the text (and thus the reader’s complacency) are the riddles and poems that Emma delights in collecting. Mr Elton’s charade, for example, stands out boldly from the preceding paragraphs, and continues to disrupt the pages that follow, as it is quoted and requoted by the baffled Harriet. If the reader is initially puzzled, the answer to the riddle is rapidly supplied by Emma, but this does not, in fact, solve all the questions raised by Mr Elton’s poem. The text offers no indication as to whether the poem has supposedly been composed by the vicar of Highbury, or copied from some miscellany or magazine, or concocted from contemporary verses. For although the sentiment is absurdly inflated, the technical quality is rather better than might be expected and thus invites speculation over its origin.30

Equally puzzling, albeit for different reasons, is Mr Wood-house’s favourite, ‘Kitty, a fair but frozen maid’. Although this is identified by Emma as the work of David Garrick and has long been decoded to refer to the word ‘chimney-sweeper’, it is nevertheless perplexing, since the original poem plays on sexual innuendo and thus seems a surprising choice for Mr Wood-house. Since he has himself forgotten the rest of the verse, the apparent inappropriateness of the riddle may seem a joke at his expense; but it is equally possible to see it as contributing an extra dimension to Mr Woodhouse’s otherwise somewhat caricatured personality, especially as it is associated in his mind with the memory of his dead wife.

A more clearly comic example of the introduction of sexuality through quotation can be seen in Mrs Elton’s remarkable resort to Gay’s Fables as a parallel to the Jane Fairfax/Frank Churchill romance:

For when a lady’s in the case,
You know all other things give place.

Although Mrs Elton, like Mr Woodhouse, has forgotten the source of her lines, many contemporary readers would have been aware that they are part of the misremembered speech of a ‘stateley bull’, whose business is pressing:

Love calls me hence; a fav’rite cow
Expects me near yon barley mow:
And when a lady’s in the case,
You know, all other things give place.31

Characteristically, the allusion is not spelled out in the text, but the extraordinary juxtaposition of Mrs Elton’s desperate gentility and unwitting coarseness is simply left to amuse and puzzle the reader, even as the plot ostensibly unravels. Indeed, Mrs Elton’s rather clumsy evocation of literature emphasizes, retrospectively, a number of other moments when characters have used the expression ‘in the case’ for unacknowledged romantic attachments. But it is only Mrs Elton who brings the novel’s perpetual undercurrent of sexual excitement to the surface and in doing so, disrupts the subtle flow of understatement, even as she boasts of her own ‘fine flow of spirits’.

Throughout Emma, the possibility of revealing too much is constantly suggested, while the moments of greatest embarrassment are those when a character has overstepped the line of reticence to uncover something that has been hidden. Whether it is Mr Elton declaring his passion in the carriage, or Frank Churchill composing ‘Dixon’inawordgame, the uncomfortable sense of rule-breaking is the same and the text is filled with episodes in which the central characters blush, colour, glow or turn red. Perhaps this is why in the concluding section of the book, where all is supposedly revealed, the narrative retreats behind the various screens of letters and dialogue, leaving the reader guessing as to the exact nature of the ‘misunderstandings’ between Jane and Frank, or the reconciliation between Harriet and Robert Martin. Even at the climactic moment when Emma accepts Mr Knightley, her words are withheld, and left to the imagination:‘What did she say?–Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does.’

In a novel that delights in flirtation and embarrassment, the reader is constantly teased into trying to find out exactly what is going on. Just as the central characters, though remarkably prone to misreading situations, seem obsessed with observing each other and establishing the truth of everyone else’s feelings and intentions, so we are drawn into the attempt to resolve individual words, scenes, quotations or actions. But since each reader notices different aspects of the book, and even interprets words subjectively, the end of the novel is really an invitation to return to the beginning and attempt once more to define its meaning.

It is not a straightforward ‘likeness’ of artistic representation and object represented that ‘pleases every body’, but the constant deflection of correspondences from one idea to another, so dazzling in its effect that it is tempting to choose one line of interpretation and ignore any contradictions. To do so, however, is to refuse to play, and although such a reaction avoids the embarrassment of getting things wrong, it also denies the endless enjoyment of Emma’s irrepressible sense of fun.

Fiona Stafford

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. The title page of the first edition reads 1816, but notices advertising its publication indicate that it appeared at the end of December, 1815.

2. W. Scott, ‘Emma’, Quarterly Review 14 (1815), 188–201.

3. P. Hickman, A Jane Austen Household Book (London, 1977); O. MacDonagh, Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds, pp.