143–4.

4. Some of the references are discussed by R. W. Chapman in the appendix to his edition of Emma, in The Novels of Jane Austen (3rd edn, 5 vols.; with additional notes by Mary Lascelles, Oxford, 1966), Vol. 4, p. 498. See also P. Piggott, The Innocent Diversion, Ch. 8. Although the exact setting of the story is inconclusive, I have drawn attention to any recognizable dates in the notes.

5. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. 4, p. 521.

6. Though not informed by the theoretical interests of the 1980s, Alistair Duckworth made an important contribution to the subsequent discussion of Austen’s textual riddles and games in ‘Spillikins, paper ships, riddles, conundrums, and cards: games in Jane Austen’s life and fiction’, Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays, ed. J. Halperin, pp. 279–97. For more recent discussion of the games in Austen’s fiction, see David Selwyn, Jane Austen and Leisure, pp. 261–301.

7. Joseph Litvak, ‘Reading Characters: Self, Society, and Text, in Emma’, PMLA 100 (1985), 763–73.

8. See, e.g., A. Rosmarin, ‘Misreading Emma: The Powers and Perfidies of Interpretive History’, ELH 51 (1984), 315–42. For a representative selection of recent critical essays, see D. Monaghan (ed.), Emma, New Casebook Series.

9. Anne-Marie Edwards, In the Steps of Jane Austen (2nd edn, Southampton, 1985), p. 158. F.W. Bradbrook, however, notes an important literary source for Austen’s description in William Gilpin’s Observations on the Western Parts of England, relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (London, 1798), sect. II, pp. 11–12, in Jane Austen and Her Predecessors, pp. 65–6.

10. Twelfth Night, II, v.

11. Dictionary of National Biography, ‘Weston, Elizabeth’; the family tree of the Westons of Sutton is included in O. Manning and H. Bray’s The History and Antiquities of the County of Surrey, 3 vols. (London, 1804–14), Vol. 1, p. 135.