the serious Mansfield Park, the classical Emma and the autumnal Persuasion. It is
hard to choose between these.Mansfield Park is not about the education of its hero-
ine:her example educates others. Amidst complex social comedy, the plain and
simple Fanny Price, a poor niece brought up at Mansfield in its splendid park but
not sophisticated by it, resists the predatory charm of visitors from London.
Edmund, her admired cousin, eventually realizes the beauty of her nature.
Moral worth is recommended less directly in Emma, a work of art designed with
economical symmetry. ‘Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a
comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best bless-
ings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little
to distress or vex her.’ Emma, the queen of the village, prides herself on her percep-
tiveness, and decides that Harriet Smith, a pretty 17-year-old of unknown birth,
whom she takes up, is too good to marry a local farmer. Emma invites her to the
house to meet the new parson, who misinterprets the encouragement and proposes
to Emma. This is only the first, however, of Emma’s mistaken efforts to marry off
Harriet. Austen so manages appearances that the reader shares Emma’s dangerous
delusions. Virtually everybody in the book is misled by their imagination. In this
sense, Austen is squarely anti-Romantic.
Emma, doted upon by her old father, believes that she herself will not marry. ‘But
still, you will be an old maid!’ says Harriet, ‘and that’s so dreadful!’ ‘Never mind,
Harriet’, Emma replies, ‘I shall not be a poor old maid; and it is poverty only which
makes celibacy contemptible to a generous public!’ Both may be thinking of a garru-
lous old spinster in the village, the good-hearted Miss Bates, an old friend of the
family who is neither handsome, clever nor rich. The normally considerate Emma is
later carried away by the playfulness of Frank Churchill at a picnic, and in a chance
re mark publicly ridicules the dullness of Miss Bates. For this cruelty she is rebuked
by Mr Knightley, a robust family friend who has the judgement which Emma’s father
lacks. Further misunderstandings ensue: Harriet Smith fancies that Mr Knightley is
inter ested in her; Knightley thinks that Emma is taken with Frank Churchill. But Mr
Churchill suddenly reveals that he has been secretly engaged to the mysterious Jane
Fairfax.
Emma is walking in the garden when Knightley calls. ‘They walked together.
He was silent.She thought he was often looking at her, and trying for a fuller view
of her face than it suited her to give.’ In Jane Austen’s tightly governed world, this
is intimacy and drama. After Knightley has chivalrously consoled Emma for the
pain caused her by Mr Churchill’s engagement, and has been undeceived, he
declares his love and entreats her to speak. The author now teases her reader:
‘What did she say? – Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does.’ Reticence
resumes. Yet Knightley comments on Mr Churchill’s secret engagement: ‘Mystery;
Finesse – how they pervert the understanding! My Emma, does not every thing
serve to prove more and more the beauty of truth and sincerity in all our dealings
with each other?’ Although the author smiles at the man’s vehemence, she too
admires truth, sincerity and plain-dealing. This is both Augustan, Romantic and
romantic.
Persuasion is for devotees her most touching and interesting novel. Eight years
before the novel begins, the 19-year-old Anne Elliott was persuaded by Lady Russell,
a friend of her dead mother, to break off her engagement with Wentworth, a man
whom she loved, accepting Lady Russell’s view that he was: ‘a young man, who had
nothing but himself to recommend him, and no hopes of attaining affluence, but in252 7 · THE ROMANTICS: 1790–1837