John Mullan: Austen once said, in a letter to her sister
Cassandra, it was a letter actually about Pride and
Prejudice, that she expected a good deal of, what she called,
ingenuity from her reader. She actually adapted a quotation
from Walter Scott's poem, Marmion. And she said, "I write
not for such dull elves as have not a great deal of ingenuity
themselves." And Emma is a kind of test of our ingenuity as
readers, what we notice and what we don't notice, what we might
be able to notice that Jane Austen has done so cleverly,
that we can only see it on a second or third, or, who knows,
fourth reading of the novel. It's a love story, Emma, but
it's not at all clear who's actually in love. And one of the
delusions that we are invited to share with the heroine is that
she knows who's in love with whom. And the deepest trick of
all is to make her convince not just that she thinks she knows
what about other characters' hearts, but that she thinks she
knows about her own part. So Emma becomes convinced that
there is a love story going on between herself and Frank
Churchill. And we have to rely on her own judgment of this. She
committed herself that she's in love with Frank Churchill and I
continued to entertain no doubt of her being in love. She's
never been in love before, she thinks she knows what love is,
but she doesn't. And, all the time, there is actually a love
story going on between her and Mr. Knightley. We should realize
from the very first chapter of Emma, where we're told that Mr.
Knightley is the only person who ever sees any faults in Emma and
certainly the only person who ever tells her about them, that
the two are destined for each other. So I feel no spoiler
alert should really be necessary. But, of course, Emma
only realize is that she's in love with Mr. Knightley at the
moment where he seems destined to marry somebody else. And
there's a famous sentence, rightly famous sentence, "it
darted through her with the speed of an arrow that Mr.
Knightley must marry no one but herself." That "must," is so
much Emma's must, that even at the moment where she thinks
she's going to lose him, she must, he must marry her. And it
seems to me to be a profound, actually, meditation on the
nature of love, that, that Jane Austen can have written a novel
where the heroine herself doesn't realize she's in love
until very late on in the novel, and, therefore, where the reader
themselves has to be tricked into this realization to, and,
as it were, re-tricked into it on each rereading of the novel,
that human psychology in Austen and narrative technique are deep
enough to show us a character who does not know their own
strongest feelings until it seems almost too late.