Oh Emma, you delightful, spirited creature! You are so well-meaning and so certain of your cleverness, yet horribly misguided. What results is nothing short of a comedy of errors.
This is my third Jane Austen, and I have a confession to make. Before I started reading her, I thought people from back in the day had no sense of humor. You only need to pick up any of the often recommended classics (all long, dull, droning on and on about rather tedious topics) to come to the same conclusion. So discovering Jane Austen has been quite the breath of fresh air and continuous source of enjoyment for me.
But first, a little bit of a rocky start. It's hard to go into a classic completely blind, especially one so famous and oft-adapted. So when I opened the pages of Emma, I already knew that one of the decisive movies of my childhood, Clueless, was based off of it. And so it is that my love for Clueless and my complete familiarity with the script made the initial chapters of this book a little more plodding than it should've been.
My brain couldn't help but compare the two. It constantly kept a running tally of every character, every scene, and every plot development I came across, happily mapping them to their corresponding one in the film while I begged it to stop. It was enormously distracting, to say the least.
But by and by, the book won me over and my brain quieted. I would say about a third of the way in, after Volume 1, was when I really started to get into and enjoy the book. The characters came alive, and Emma's smug and self-congratulatory meddling, all to unintended consequences, brought so many smiles and chuckles my way.
But it isn't just silly nonsense, one after another. If it were, this would've quickly deteriorated into slapstick comedy or artificial fluff. What makes this tale so scintillating is that Emma possesses self-awareness. She walks away from each experience with some much needed understanding and contrition, and that is what ultimately makes her such a likable and relatable heroine.
Jane Austen really has a way with words. Her writing is quite dialogue-heavy and she spends a lot of back and forth on each topic, way more than I see in contemporary writing. Yet her witticism not only prevents the scene from becoming stale and repetitive, but rather makes each additional sentence shine with ever more insight.
Let's talk about the romance. I mean, there's a reason why many consider Jane Austen to have laid the foundation to the Regency romance genre. Here, we have what must be the OG friends-to-lovers, and I'm all for that. The slow burn, especially as it starts to crystalize in Volume 3, was swoon-worthy and oh so satisfying. Add to that the grumpy/sunshine vibes and the eventual emotional reveal, and I confess I shed some tears.
This is a story where it gets better and better as it goes on. At first, Emma's folly produces some less than ideal results, but really no harm no foul. All is forgiven, especially from her perspective. But then as time goes on, the consequences and misunderstandings start piling up, and eventually all of Emma's chickens come home to roost. That, plus the slow burn romance, all add up to a thoroughly riveting and immensely gratifying arc and conclusion to the story.
I'm solidly in my Jane Austen era now, and I totally get why she still has such a fervent fanbase this many centuries after her stories were first written. While much has changed in our lives since the 18th century, much still remains the same. And her characters, her stories, her astute observations all seem destined to remain as timeless now as they did when they were first created.
Readaroo Rating: 4 stars
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