Emma as a novel was revolutionary in its form and technique.

Its heroine is a self-

deluded young woman with the leisure and power to meddle in the lives of her
neighbours. The narrative was radically experimental because it was designed to
share her delusions. The novel bent narration through the distorting lens of its
(((((((((((((((protagonist’s mind. )))))))))))))

To measure the audacity ‫ جراءة وقاحة تهور‬of the book, take a simple sentence that no novelist
before her could have written. Our privileged heroine has befriended a sweet, open, deeply
naive ‫ ساذج بريئ‬girl of 17 called Harriet Smith. It is a wholly unequal relationship: Emma is
the richest and cleverest woman in Highbury; Harriet is the “natural daughter of
someone”, left as a permanent resident of the genteel girls’ boarding school in the town.
While cultivating their relationship, Emma knows very well that Harriet is her inferior.
“But in every respect as she saw more of her, she was confirmed in all her kind designs.”

The sentence is in the third person, yet we are not exactly being told something by the
author. “Kind designs” is Emma’s complacent judgment of herself. Even the rhyme in the
phrase makes it sound better to herself. In fact, the kindness is all in the mind of the
beholder. Emma has set out to mould ‫ تصمم تعفن‬Harriet.

Emma’s former companion, Miss Taylor, has got married and become Mrs Weston,
leaving her solitary and at a loose end. Harriet will be her project. Her plans are kind, she
tells herself, because she will improve this uninstructed and wide-eyed young woman. We
should be able to hear, however, that her designs are utterly self-serving. Soon she is
persuading Harriet to refuse a marriage proposal from a farmer who loves her, and
beguiling her with the wholly illusory ‫ واهم‬prospect of marriage to the smooth young vicar,
Mr Elton.

Take another little sentence from much later in the novel. By now Emma is convinced that
Harriet, scorned by Mr Elton, can be paired off with the highly eligible Frank Churchill.
The only impediment seems to be the inflexible Mrs Churchill, Frank’s adoptive mother,
who expects him to find a much grander wife. Then news arrives of Mrs Churchill’s
sudden death. Emma meets Harriet, who has also heard. “Harriet behaved extremely well
on the occasion, with great self-command.” Obviously she is learning self-possession from
her patron. “Emma was gratified to observe such a proof in her of strengthened
character.”

Except that this is all twaddle. Harriet does not give a fig for Frank and never has. Emma has
elaborately deluded herself again. The narration follows the path of Emma’s errors.
Indeed, the first-time reader will sometimes follow this path too, and then share the
heroine’s surprise when the truth rushes upon her. Yet it is still a third-person narrative;
Emma is not telling her own story. We both share her judgments and watch her making
them.
. She was perfecting a technique

Which in the early 20th century critics began agreeing on a name for it: free indirect style (a
translation from the original French: style indirect libre).

(((((((((((AUSTIN imbueses a third-person narration with the habits of thought or

expression of a fictional character.)))))))))))))

Before Austen, novelists chose between first-person narrative (letting us into the mind of a
character, but limiting us to his or her understanding)

and third-person narrative (allowing us a God-like view of all the characters, but making
them pieces in an authorial game).

))))))))))))))) Austen miraculously combined the internal and the external.(((((((((((

Austen used it with an assurance that has never been surpassed.

----------------“Telling the story through the consciousness ‫ وعي‬of characters whose

understanding of events is partial, mistaken, deceived, or self-deceived.” It has been easy
for sophisticated readers – especially rival novelists – to miss her sophistication.

By the time that she began writing Emma, Austen was no longer responding to other
novelists, she was in new territory, in dialogue with her own earlier novels. She had been
steeped in the fiction of the 18th and early 19th centuries, and in her earliest work she
wrote against the novels of sensibility or the gothic fiction that she knew so well. But in the
creative furore that saw her complete her last four novels in five years, she left the
conventions of existing fiction behind. She began work on Emma before she had even
received the proofs of Mansfield Park. That novel’s heroine, Fanny Price, was reticent,
self-abnegating, powerless and often silent or absent. As if in response to her own
experiment, she now created a heroine who is assertive, dominant, all too powerful. Emma
Woodhouse thrusts herself forward in the novel’s title and its very first sentence.

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Her viewpoint is so dominant that it takes several readings before you realise how subtly we
are invited to imagine how Emma looks to some of the other characters. How Mr Elton
imagines that she is egging him on to propose to her (“I think your manners to him
encouraging”, warns Mr John Knightley, to no avail). How Jane Fairfax dreads her
inquisitiveness and hates her monopolising of Frank Churchill. How the Martin family
must regard her as the heartless snob who has torn Harriet away from the man who loves
her. All this is intimated through Emma’s own glimmerings of insight – which she duly
crushes. Austen’s narrative enacts her heroine’s victories over her own better self.
There is, however, one carefully calculated chapter in the whole novel narrated from another
character’s viewpoint. Deep in the third volume, Austen jolts the reader with a chapter
from Mr Knightley’s point of view. It comes at a crucial point, where Frank
uncharacteristically blunders by mentioning an item of parochial gossip that he can only
know from his secret correspondence with Jane: Mr Perry the apothecary is getting a
carriage (because he is making so much money from the maladies imaginaries of
Highbury). How could he know? “It must have been a dream,” laughs Frank. Emma is “out
of hearing”, but Mr Knightley is observing. He watches as all the major characters sit
down to play a word game (the novel is full of games and puzzles) and Frank selects
the letters for the word “blunder”. Mr Knightley sees and suspects. “Disingenuousness and
double-dealing seemed to meet him at every turn.” The spell of Emma’s consciousness has
been so powerful that Austen has to wake us up for a moment. But the chapter ends with
Mr Knightley suggesting to Emma that there might be some intimate “degree of
acquaintance” between Frank and Jane – only to have his suspicions routed by her. “There
is no admiration between them, I do assure you.” No one can say she was not given the
chance to see the truth.

By the time she began Emma, Austen was in new territory. She had left existing fiction behind

Austen has several different ways of getting us to read through Emma. At key moments, free
indirect style becomes something closer to dramatised thought. Austen develops her own
system of punctuation for this. Here is our heroine, back home after the Westons’
Christmas Eve dinner party, reflecting on Mr Elton’s marriage proposal (“actually
making violent love to her”) in the carriage home. She had persuaded herself that he was
amorously interested in Harriet; worse, she had persuaded Harriet of this too.

The hair was curled, and the maid sent away, and Emma sat down to think and be
miserable.—It was a wretched business indeed!—Such an overthrow of every thing she
had been wishing for!—Such a development of every thing most unwelcome!—Such a
blow for Harriet!—that was the worst of all. Every part of it brought pain and
humiliation, of some sort or other; but, compared with the evil to Harriet, all was light;
and she would gladly have submitted to feel yet more mistaken—more in error—more
disgraced by mis-judgment, than she actually was, could the effects of her blunders have
been confined to herself.

Austen’s idiosyncratic punctuation, that system of exclamation marks and dashes, allows for
a kind of dramatised thought process. Yet because it is still in the third person, we can
judge Emma even as we share her thoughts. She is a person worth our sympathy because
she is capable of acknowledging and feeling sorry for her mistakes. But, by the
unprecedented subtlety of Austen’s narrative technique, we sense that Emma regrets the
scotching of her plans (“Such an overthrow of everything she had been wishing for!”) as
much as (or more than?) the impending pain for Harriet. We can even hear her trying to
persuade herself (“she would gladly have submitted … ”) of her unselfishness.

The novel’s stylistic innovations allow it to explore not just a character’s feelings, but,
comically, her deep ignorance of her own feelings. Out of vanity, encouraged by the
 promptings of Mr and Mrs Weston, Emma has persuaded herself that Frank, whom she
has never met, might be the perfect partner for her. When he finally turns up he proves
handsome and humorous and intelligent. Understandably, she soon starts seeing the signs
that he must be falling for her; better still, she also starts convincing herself that “she must
be a little in love with him”. A few amusing confidences shared with smooth Frank
Churchill, and she presumes it is the real thing. “Emma continued to entertain no doubt of
her being in love.” Her capacity for self-congratulation deceives her about even the
workings of her own heart. Austen does not tell us this, as George Eliot would eloquently
tell us: she simply lets us inhabit Emma’s consciousness, simply lets us see the world
according to Emma.

Even better is her self-deception about the man whom she does love. When Mrs Weston
suggests that Mr Knightley’s evident admiration of Jane presages their likely marriage, the
narrative tells us of Emma’s response, but also stages her self-deception.

She could see nothing but evil in it. It would be a great disappointment to Mr. John
Knightley; consequently to Isabella. A real injury to the children—a most mortifying
change, and material loss to them all;—a very great deduction from her father’s daily
comfort—and, as to herself, she could not at all endure the idea of Jane Fairfax at
Donwell Abbey. A Mrs. Knightley for them all to give way to!—No—Mr. Knightley must
never marry. Little Henry must remain the heir of Donwell.

How natural, then, that when our heroine does realise what love is, it is as a nasty shock. Her
erstwhile puppet – now her Frankenstein’s monster – Harriet reveals that she (no longer
quite so modest) has her heart set on Mr Knightley and has good reason to think that he
returns her affection. Why is the idea of Harriet marrying Mr Knightley so unacceptable?
“It darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one
but herself!” What a brilliant sentence that is! With absolute daring, Austen shows us that
love can be a discovery of what a person has unknowingly felt for many a long month or
year. Now, suddenly and for the first time, Emma understands the plot of her own story.
But even at this moment of self-knowledge Austen lets us hear or feel the character’s
imperiousness, her overpowering sense that events “must” meet her desires.

Which is why those who condemn the novel by saying that its heroine is a snob miss the
point. Of course she is. But Austen, with a refusal of moralism worthy of Flaubert,
abandons her protagonist to her snobbery and confidently risks inciting foolish readers to
think that the author must be a snob too. Emma’s snobbery pervades the novel, from that
moment when we hear Mrs Goddard, the mistress of the little girls’ boarding school, and
Mrs and Miss Bates described as “the most come-at-able” denizens of Highbury (meaning
that they are at the beck and call of Emma and her hypochondriac father). Austen has the
integrity to make Emma snobbish even when she is in the right. When Mr Elton proposes
to her she recognises what the reader has always known: he is vain, cold-hearted and
repulsive. But her enlightenment is also affronted dignity:

Those who condemn the novel by saying that its heroine is a snob miss the point. Of course she is
But—that he should talk of encouragement, should consider her as aware of his views,
accepting his attentions, meaning (in short), to marry him!—should suppose himself her
equal in connexion or mind!—look down upon her friend, so well understanding the
gradations of rank below him, and be so blind to what rose above, as to fancy himself
shewing no presumption in addressing her!—It was most provoking.

Similarly, her run-ins with Mrs Elton, some of the best comic dialogues in all fiction, show
her to be perceptive and socially arrogant in equal measure. Mrs Elton, newly arrived in
Highbury, visits Emma and talks of her introduction to Mr Knightley.

“I must do my caro sposo the justice to say that he need not be ashamed of his friend.
Knightley is quite the gentleman. I like him very much. Decidedly, I think, a
very gentleman-like man.”

Only when Mrs Elton leaves can Emma “breathe” her indignation.

“A little upstart, vulgar being, with her Mr. E., and her caro sposo, and her resources, and
all her airs of pert pretension and underbred finery. Actually to discover that
Mr. Knightley is a gentleman! I doubt whether he will return the compliment, and
discover her to be a lady. I could not have believed it! And to propose that she and
I should unite to form a musical club!”

Emma is right – and yet Emma too is full of herself. She even, unconsciously, uses the same
vocabulary as her foe, who assures her, “I have quite a horror of upstarts”.

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The magnificently ghastly Mrs Elton makes herself known through her voice and,
in Emma, Austen discovers new and unprecedented ways of making a human voice live in
print. Some of her techniques foresee the ingenuities of modernism. When Mrs Elton
picks strawberries at Mr Knightley’s party at Donwell Abbey, a paragraph of fractured
monologue brilliantly dramatises what must be at least half an hour’s worth of bossy
babble.

“The best fruit in England—everybody’s favourite—always wholesome. These the finest beds
and finest sorts.—Delightful to gather for one’s self—the only way of really enjoying them.
Morning decidedly the best time—never tired—every sort good—hautboy infinitely
superior—no comparison—the others hardly eatable—hautboys very scarce—Chili
preferred—white wood finest flavour of all—price of strawberries in London—abundance
about Bristol—Maple Grove—cultivation—beds when to be renewed—gardeners thinking
exactly different—no general rule—gardeners never to be put out of their way—delicious
fruit—only too rich to be eaten much of—inferior to cherries—currants more refreshing—
only objection to gathering strawberries the stooping—glaring sun—tired to death—could
bear it no longer—must go and sit in the shade.”
A ludicrous progress from know-all enthusiasm to sun-struck exhaustion. For garrulous
Miss Bates, Highbury’s good-hearted resident bore, Austen invents a different kind of
monologic outpouring that some have called Joycean. Here is just a little sample, as Miss
Bates arrives for the ball at the Crown Inn.

“Thank you, my mother is remarkably well. Gone to Mr. Woodhouse’s. I made her take her
shawl—for the evenings are not warm—her large new shawl— Mrs. Dixon’s wedding-
present.—So kind of her to think of my mother! Bought at Weymouth, you know—Mr.
Dixon’s choice. There were three others, Jane says, which they hesitated about some time.
Colonel Campbell rather preferred an olive. My dear Jane, are you sure you did not wet
your feet?—It was but a drop or two, but I am so afraid:—but Mr. Frank Churchill was so
extremely—and there was a mat to step upon—I shall never forget his extreme politeness.”

And so on. There are other people here, not just listening but speaking, or trying to speak.
And yet Miss Bates’s voice, self-generating and unstoppable, becomes for a while the only
one you can hear.

Emma hardly listens to her “prosing”, and there have been readers who have likewise
skipped the details of her speech. But one of Austen’s tricks is to embed many a clue as to
the real ruses of other characters in the unsuspicious outpourings of this much-ignored
old maid. “What is before me, I see,” she says, typically declaring herself incapable of
perceiving what is indirect or implicit. But what she says is truer than what anyone hears:
she is the reliable witness to what is really going on. Even that passage above offers clues
as to what Frank is really up to. If this is a detective story, then Miss Bates is the foolish
bit-part player offering the apparently trivial testimony that is dangerously ignored.

Frank is, of course, conducting a covert romance with Jane, Miss Bates’s orphan niece, but
he is so clever that it is easy to miss his tricks. Sharing Emma’s perspective, we sometimes
get fooled too. Perhaps on a second reading of the novel we are properly suspicious of
Frank’s motives in volunteering to mend the rivet in Mrs Bates’s spectacles: Jane is
staying at the Bates’s tiny flat and he is always finding excuses to visit. But it will probably
take more than two readings for most readers to notice how he has managed to get Miss
Bates out of the flat – she bustles over the street to invite Emma in – so that he is alone
with Jane and the sleeping (and stone deaf) old Mrs Bates. When we enter the front door
with Emma we see through her eyes.

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The appearance of the little sitting-room as they entered, was tranquillity itself; Mrs. Bates,
deprived of her usual employment, slumbering on one side of the fire, Frank Churchill, at
a table near her, most deedily occupied about her spectacles, and Jane, standing with her
back to them, intent on her pianoforte.
Emma sees nothing untoward – but what has really been going on? Why is Frank so “deedily
occupied” and Jane “intent” on a musical instrument? Surely they have been in a close
embrace. It is as if there is a Charlotte Brontë story going on under Emma’s nose.

“The Passions are perfectly unknown to her,” Brontë declared, sounding like a character
whom Austen would have delighted in depicting. She had been recommended Pride and
Prejudice by George Eliot’s partner, George Henry Lewes, who was partly responsible for
Eliot holding Austen in higher regard than most of the other great novelists of the 19th
century. Lewes’s 1859 essay in Blackwood’s Magazine is still one of the most perceptive
analyses of Austen’s powers.

But instead of description, the common and easy resource of novelists, she has the rare and
difficult art of dramatic presentation: instead of telling us what her characters are, and
what they feel, she presents the people, and they reveal themselves. In this she has never
perhaps been surpassed, not even by Shakespeare himself.

Yet Lewes was rare among serious writers in giving her this status. But then, with Emma,
Austen almost seems to be tempting inattentive readers to overlook her technical audacity
– to miss her tricks.

None of Austen’s novels is as full of tricks as Emma, and many of them are carefully
concealed to reward the rereader. I remember the moment, after many readings over the
years, when I finally saw what she was doing with Mr Perry, the apothecary. Everyone is
always quoting him, especially Emma’s valetudinarian father Mr Woodhouse: “as Perry
says …”; “… This is just what Perry said”; “Ah! my dear, but Perry had many doubts about
the sea doing her any good.” Mr Perry is always being spotted passing by (all those
lucrative house calls) and his views are always being reported. Yet not a single word that
he ever says is actually given us in the novel. Of course not! He is the echo to every
person’s existing prejudices; no wonder he is so successful. It is a joke buried by Austen
for posterity to discover. As she told her sister Cassandra, she only wrote for those who
had “a great deal of ingenuity themselves”.