Are you looking for a lighthearted and comedic classic? Then Emma is the perfect book for you! Written in 1814 by Jane Austen, Emma is a coming of age novel that explores friendship, social standing, and romance in early 1800s England. Emma is the perfect read for anyone who enjoys coming of age stories and would like to challenge themselves by reading Early Modern English.
While Emma was written in a historical time period, it is not considered historical fiction because it was written in the time period it takes place — historical fiction is written after the time period it takes place in. Emma is more widely considered coming of age because the story follows Emma as she experiences defining moments in her life.
Emma is told from a third person omniscient point of view, focusing on the life of a girl named Emma. She is a beautiful, clever, and moderately arrogant girl living in the small town of Highbury, England. She believes herself to be a matchmaker and is very confident in her talent. The story starts when she tries to set up her friend Harriet up with someone of her same social class and, after several bumps in the road, she learns that her actions can have very large and negative consequences.
Austen does a lovely job painting Emma as a nuanced and authentic character. While I personally don’t agree with many of Emma’s actions, Austen helps us understand why she does them. While Austen does use Early Modern English, it isn’t too difficult to understand once you get into the flow of the language. It is a lot more formal than English that we use, but that makes it so much more interesting because she uses lots of words that aren’t commonly used today, like “reproof,” “threadbare,” or “scruples.”
While you may not be finding husbands for your friends, lots of the topics and themes of Emma apply to our modern world, like recognizing one’s own flaws to effectively grow and mature as a person, or that age and experience come with a better understanding of love, both romantic and platonic, and relationships.
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I like Jane Austen as well, and Emma is definitely a very interesting novel from so many angles. I agree that the diction is different than what we’re used to – it’s more archaic but still gives simplicity combined with elegance. It would also be interesting to note how the characters in Emma talk, a form of English used mostly by landed gentry, versus the type of English used by common people in the Georgian era, which might be more similar to our speech today. I also like your description of the plot – it sounds like a great, fun read!
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