Book of the Week

Emma by Jane Austen
Recommended by Will Palmer

Emma is a novel written by Jane Austen, which tells a tale of the English gentry in the early 19th century.

This review has the purpose of enticing you into reading the book and yes, I am aware that my very first sentence will entice only a very specific group of people. Therefore, it being my job to entice every reader of this review, I shall now persuade you as to why Emma is one of the greatest comedy of manners novels of all time.


Emma is set in the fictional village of Highbury and its surrounding estates, commentating on the social life of characters who live there. For the most part it closely follows Emma Woodhouse, a vivacious, spoiled, beautiful socialite fringing on extreme arrogance, who spends her time endeavouring to make romantic matches among her acquaintances, while seeming to stoically refuse any involvement in love herself.

Austen portrays Emma's often ignorant character in a hilarious way, and any reader grows to love the eponymous protagonist, although Austen herself said that Emma is 'a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like.' She said this because, should the same character have been in any other book, Emma would be a very dislikeable person. However, Austen's incredibly writing style and the story she builds around Emma induce great hilarity in a reader, somehow forcing you to find her personality to be charmingly endearing.

 

One of Austen's great literary weapons is her use of irony. She gives you the perspective and opinions of Emma, while you watch on in omniscience. This creates an effect of hilarious irony, as you watch her blunder through her social life, laughing at her complete ignorance of her own blind errors.

So, to you, the potential reader of this heavily ironic, convivial novel, I strongly recommend this book, particularly if in the past you have enjoyed similar stories of the gentry. I would also recommend this book to casual readers of short, satirical stories such as the Jeeves and Wooster books, who are looking for something more substantial. Finally, I would endorse reading Emma multiple times, as with each time you see more of the complexities of the irony and sarcasm, which means it just gets funnier and funnier.