The bibliographical basis of the Penguin Edition is David Gilson’s Bibliography of Jane Austen (Clarendon, 1982), to which the edition is happy to acknowledge its debt.
Claire Lamont
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Textual Adviser
Chronology
1775 Jane Austen born on 16 December, the second daughter and seventh child of the Revd George Austen and his wife, Cassandra Leigh. Her father was rector of the village of Steventon in Hampshire. The family was well-connected although not rich. Two of her brothers entered the navy and rose to the rank of Rear-Admiral.
1776 American Declaration of Independence.
1778 Frances Burney published Evelina.
1785–6 Austen, with her sister Cassandra, attended the Abbey School, Reading.
1787 Austen started to write the short, parodic pieces of fiction known as her Juvenilia.
1789 French Revolution broke out.
1792 Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
1793 Britain at war with revolutionary France.
1794 Ann Radcliffe published The Mysteries of Udolpho.
1795 Austen wrote ‘Elinor and Marianne’, a first version of Sense and Sensibility.
1796 Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte in France.
1796–7 Austen wrote ‘First Impressions’, a first version of Pride and Prejudice.
1797 ‘First Impressions’ offered to a publisher, who refused it.
1798–9 ‘Susan’, an early version of Northanger Abbey, written.
1801 Austen’s father retired and the family moved to Bath.
1802 In France Napoleon appointed Consul for life.
1802 Austen accepted a proposal of marriage from Harris Bigg-Wither, but changed her mind the following day.
1803 ‘Susan’ sold for £10 to the publisher Crosby, who did not publish it.
1804 Austen wrote unfinished novel, ‘The Watsons’.
1805 Austen’s father died. Battle of Trafalgar.
1807 Austen moved with her mother and sister to Southampton.
1809 Austen moved with her mother and sister to a house in the village of Chawton in Hampshire, owned by her brother Edward, which was her home for the rest of her life.
1811 Sense and Sensibility published.
1811 Illness of King George III caused the Prince of Wales to be appointed Prince Regent.
1813 Pride and Prejudice published.
1814 Mansfield Park published.
1815 Wellington and Blücher defeat French at the Battle of Waterloo, bringing to an end the Napoleonic Wars.
1815 (December) Emma published and dedicated at his request to the Prince Regent.
1816 Austen’s health started to deteriorate; she finished Per suasion. ‘Susan’ bought back from Crosby. Walter Scott reviewed Emma flatteringly in the Quarterly Review.
1817 Jane Austen died on 18 July in Winchester, where she had gone for medical attention, and was buried in Winchester Cathedral.
1818 Her brother Henry oversaw the publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, with a biographical notice of the writer.
Introduction
From its first appearance, late in December 1815, Emma has been criticized for its lack of action while being eulogized for its accurate depiction of everyday life.1 Walter Scott, one of the earliest reviewers, found the book to have ‘even less story’ than Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice, but nevertheless admired the author’s ‘knowledge of the world, and the peculiar tact with which she presents characters that the reader cannot fail to recognize’.2 Almost two centuries later, similar attitudes are to be found among those general readers who continue to delight in Austen’s ability to create lifelike characters and situations, and among critics of a historical bent, who turn to her novels for information on how people lived in the early nineteenth century. Emma has fed such books as Peggy Hick-man’s A Jane Austen Household Book, where Mr Woodhouse’s pride in Hartfield pork occasions the publication of a series of Regency meat dishes, as well as more academic studies such as Oliver MacDonagh’s Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds, where Highbury is taken as a model for the ‘social organization and habits’ of ‘the small towns and villages of south-eastern England during the Napoleonic wars’.3
Approaches of this kind reveal a persistent desire on the part of Emma’s readers to ground the novel in the ‘real world’, which in turn leads to careful study of any detail that might fix it in a specific time and place. It is not enough that the novel is roughly contemporary with its composition (between 21 January 1814 and 29 March 1815); internal references to such recognizable events as the Union between Britain and Ireland, the abolition of the slave trade or the publication of Moore’s Irish Melodies, have sent scholars scurrying from 1800 to 1808 to 1813, without necessarily shedding very much light on Emma itself.4 The geography of Surrey, too, has tantalized generations of readers eager to follow in the footsteps of Mr Elton or Jane Fairfax, to explore Box Hill, or visit The Crown. It is as if sorting out the exact location and plan of Highbury will somehow explain the novel, even though Austen’s most distinguished editor, R. W. Chapman, admitted years ago that ‘the indications are just not sufficient’ to construct a map.5
Paradoxically, it is the very evasiveness of Emma that has prompted these determined efforts to establish the authenticity of this portrayal of early nineteenth-century Surrey; and over the last two decades an alternative tradition has developed among readers interested not in the realistic detail of the text, but in its riddles, anagrams and puns.6 Although there are those who still regard Austen’s work as a window on the past, many critics are now willing to celebrate the irresolution of the text, regarding the words of the narrator (and even Mr Knightley) not as indicators of authorial intention, but as part of a series of competing discourses and linguistic puzzles.
If readers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw Austen as a proponent of nineteenth-century moral values, recent critics have suggested that her work is ‘subversive’ since, as Joseph Litvak has commented, Emma is a ‘potentially endless circuit of fiction, interpretation and desire’.7 In response, perhaps, to the long-standing critical emphasis on realism, the 1980s saw a tendency to make Emma independent of place, period and even author, an autonomous text to be treated on its own terms irrespective of contemporary context or the ever-inaccessible views of Jane Austen.8
The difficulty is, of course, that both approaches find rewards in Emma, which continually teases the reader with realistic clues and self-reflexive ironies. A key location such as Box Hill, for example, presents no problems for those keen to read the novel as social history. Anne-Marie Edwards has observed that Austen visited her relatives, the Cookes, at Great Bookham Rectory in June 1814, and sees the experience contributing directly to the work at hand: