--- title: Why Jane Austen’s 'Emma' Still Intrigues 200 Years Later description: The comedy of manners shows the novelist “at the height of her powers” canonical: https://time.com/4130612/jane-austen-emma-200th-anniversary/ author: Sarah Begley article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-12-01T19:48:59.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-22T12:59:25.975Z article:section: History og:title: Why Jane Austen’s 'Emma' Still Intrigues 200 Years Later og:description: The novel was released in December of 1815 og:url: https://time.com/4130612/jane-austen-emma-200th-anniversary/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3e63ad8a667b85fa/698873328e0601fd344638c3/emma.jpg?branch=production&width=1120&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1120 og:image:height: 630 og:image:alt: emma og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Why Jane Austen’s 'Emma' Still Intrigues 200 Years Later twitter:description: The novel was released in December of 1815 twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3e63ad8a667b85fa/698873328e0601fd344638c3/emma.jpg?branch=production&width=1120&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Why Jane Austen’s _Emma_ Still Intrigues 200 Years Later > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. by [Sarah Begley](https://time.com/author/sarah-begley/) ## Sarah Begley Dec 1, 2015 7:48 PM UTC  Penguin Classics by [Sarah Begley](https://time.com/author/sarah-begley/) ## Sarah Begley Dec 1, 2015 7:48 PM UTC For many Jane Austen fans, reading _Pride and Prejudice_ is their first and fondest experience with the author. But most critics and scholars agree that her finest work was really _Emma_, the story of an altruistic but self-absorbed, wealthy and beautiful young woman with a penchant for matchmaking who swears never to marry but falls in love anyway. The shallow but well-meaning Emma Woodhouse turns 200 this month—and if she doesn’t sound like a perfectly swoon-inducing leading lady, Austen herself agreed: she once described the character as “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” Yet her story proved the perfect vessel for Austen to write “at the height of her powers,” says Austen scholar Juliette Wells. Wells, an associate professor at Goucher College and the editor of a new annotated 200th-anniversary edition of [_Emma_](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0143107712/?tag=timecom-20) from Penguin Classics, says that in addition to the novel exemplifying Austen’s “most magnificent use of language,” it combines the best of Austen’s two writerly periods. “We see certainly some of the humor that was present more fully in _Pride and Prejudice,_ and we see some of the moral seriousness that was there in _Mansfield Park_,” she says, “but it’s not as overwhelming in _Emma_.” The book marks Austen’s best use of free indirect discourse, with the narration hewing close enough to Emma’s own perspective that the reader stays blind to the secrets that are also kept from Emma herself but not so close that the heroine’s self-absorption becomes unbearable. Austen’s execution of the form, still relatively new in that period, marked an important turning point in literature. “She didn’t invent free indirect discourse,” Wells says, “it had been used by others—but she’s certainly the one who took it the farthest and established its primacy, its necessariness.” That _pas de deux_ between clarity and obscurity allows for surprises in the novel’s denouement—a secret engagement, a proposal and even the sudden delivery of a baby. “Austen is adhering to the convention that you would not talk about pregnancy in the real world or in the fictional world until it had ended, almost,” Wells says. “If you’re reading _Emma_ for the first time, you’re not necessarily aware of how old \[Mrs. Weston\] is or isn’t. And so the pregnancy comes as a surprise there, too.” But the novel’s endurance is not just a matter of literary quality. As so many Austen fans have noted, human nature hasn’t changed. Though the pregnancy secrecy may seem foreign today, other elements of the plot are more readily recognizable to modern readers, Wells says. Her students who come from cultures where parental devotion is prized understand Emma’s choice not to leave her father’s household, and others who feel the pressure to wed can relate to the scramble of Regency-period matchmaking—and all of us can recognize our family, friends and acquaintances in the skewered secondary characters, like talkative Miss Bates, presumptuous Mrs. Elton and aloof Jane Fairfax. And, though readers today are often uncomfortable with the age gap between Emma and her eventual love, Mr. Knightley, the romance is a modern one in many ways. If it lacks the universal appeal of Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, it boasts a realistically gradual arc. Emma is unbothered by the idea that she’ll never find love, and Mr. Knightley doesn’t rush in head-first either. “You have the sense that he wakes up very slowly to the fact that he actually does desire her,” Wells says. Perhaps all that’s missing to get contemporary readers to appreciate _Emma_ the way they do _Pride and Prejudice_ is a top-notch film or television adaptation. Amy Heckerling’s _Clueless_, a playful 1990’s homage, is “a work of genius,” Wells says, but “there’s not one single period adaptation that everybody loves.” While the Gwyneth Paltrow-starring 1996 film and a 2009 BBC mini-series were both reasonably well received, “we’re still waiting for the really definitive great _Emma_ adaptation.” Maybe all the modern reader needs to fall in love with Emma Woodhouse on the page is to fall in love with Mr. Knightley on screen, [Colin Firth lake scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hasKmDr1yrA)\-style. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4130612/jane-austen-emma-200th-anniversary/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4130612/jane-austen-emma-200th-anniversary/"},"headline":"Why Jane Austen’s Emma Still Intrigues 200 Years Later","datePublished":"2015-12-01T19:48:59.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-22T12:59:25.975Z","description":"The novel was released in December of 1815","url":"https://time.com/4130612/jane-austen-emma-200th-anniversary/","keywords":["Books"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3e63ad8a667b85fa/698873328e0601fd344638c3/emma.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Sarah Begley","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/sarah-begley/"}],"articleSection":"History","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3e63ad8a667b85fa/698873328e0601fd344638c3/emma.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"emma","caption":"","creditText":"Penguin Classics","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/history/","name":"History"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/books/","name":"Books"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/4130612/jane-austen-emma-200th-anniversary/","name":"Why Jane Austen’s Emma Still Intrigues 200 Years Later"}}]}] ```