The most dramatic moment in Jane Austen’s Emma, and, arguably, in her whole body of work, has nothing to do with romance. After all, Emma Woodhouse’s reaction to George Knightley’s proposal is a bit of a place holder. The scene in the gardens outside Hartfield swells as Knightley speaks to Emma of his desperate, undeniable longing, and then Austen writes “What did [Emma] say? Just what she ought, of course, a lady always does.” Hmmm.Article continues after advertisement
In the five years preceding Emma’s publication, Austen had mapped a healthy handful of serpentine paths to happy endings: Elinor and Marianne Dashwood had been saved from poverty by the respective loves of a cleric and a retired military man; likewise Elizabeth and Jane Bennet were able to overcome financial uncertainty and family shame by way of the central aisle; and even that goody-good Fanny Price had finally fallen into the bland but wholesome arms of Edmund Bertram. (Mansfield Park was, in fact, Austen’s best earner during her life, perhaps because it looked the most like the novels of writers who had preceded her.) One feels that even before she has maneuvered Emma and George together in that garden, Austen has mastered this territory and is looking to explore further afield.
