Resumo de Emma - Jane Austen

Jane Austen (1775-1817) brought to perfection, if she did not originate, the so-called novel of manners. This genre of the novel deals with the etiquette of social intercourse, and is therefore limited to a scrutiny of the upper classes who observe a certain code in their dealings with one another. Emma, the eponymous heroine of the last novel published in Austen's lifetime (written 1815), is perhaps the most human and comic of the authoress?s main protagonists in the fictional beau monde she made her own.

Emma is a sprig of the British country squirearchy, the younger daughter of a rustic British landowner, Mr. Woodhouse of Hartfield. Still in her teens, Emma has been raised by a governess, one Miss Taylor, who is about to exchange her ward for a husband. With the departure of this matriarchal figure, the young woman now reigns supreme in her father?s household.

Reigning supreme is what leads to Emma?s downfall, figuratively speaking, for she is still a mere slip of a girl, though she fancies herself a woman of the world with wisdom enough to settle the affairs of all her friends and hangers-on. Self-delusion and snobbery combine to form a potent brew, unsettling Emma's placid life in a pastoral retreat of Georgian England.

The novel?s plot centers around Emma?s miscalculations, both about her own motives and those of the characters she attempts to manipulate. Though hers is a high-minded and attractive personality, the impetuousness of her wish to act the matchmaker for the less high-born and more indulgent of her neighbors ultimately forces her to recognize the recklessness of a bossy young miss tinkering with the lives of her more or less intractable contemporaries. With this recognition, a dawning maturity leads to a happy ending in the arms of her secret admirer and reticent wooer, Mr. Knightley, whom she had hitherto regarded as just one more potential victim of her matchmaking proclivities.

Emma is unique among Jane Austen?s novels in that a tragic potential never darkens the blue skies of the arcadian setting. Though Emma does go astray now and then, she never ventures to the brink of disaster, as her sister heroines do in novels such as Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey, The satirical sparkle of her story is all the more scintillating for this omission.

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