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    A Study Guide for Jane Austen's Emma
    A Study Guide for Jane Austen's Emma
    A Study Guide for Jane Austen's Emma
    Ebook55 pages1 hour

    A Study Guide for Jane Austen's Emma

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Jane Austen's "Emma," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 14, 2015
    ISBN9781535822701
    A Study Guide for Jane Austen's Emma

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      A Study Guide for Jane Austen's Emma - Gale

      1

      Emma

      Jane Austen

      1815

      Introduction

      Of the 2,000 copes of Emma printed in 1815, only 563 sold over the next four years. Austen died in 1817 having earned less than £40 for the book during her lifetime. In the early 2000s, the novel was considered a classic of romance comedies and perhaps Austen's best novel of manners and morals. Written at the end of Austen's young life, and hence in her maturity, Emma fully demonstrates Austen's narrative power to render witty dialogue, romantic intrigue, memorable descriptions of scenes and situations, and the ironic and satirical treatment of the virtues, vices, and drawing room behavior of the British upper classes at the end of the eighteenth century. To combine both rationality and compassion in one's actions is the mark of true gentility, Austen seems to be saying. Yet, lest readers take this central lesson too much to heart, Austen gives plenty to laugh at and puzzle over as her flawed but redeemable heroine fumbles her way toward womanhood.

      Author Biography

      Jane Austen was the second daughter and the seventh of eight children born to the Reverend George Austen and Cassandra Leigh. Born on December 16, 1775, she grew up in the country village of Steventon, in Hampshire, England.

      Her family was not wealthy, but they were certainly comfortable, for Jane Austen's father earned £600 a year as the local clergyman. This was a respectable salary but not one that could provide either Jane or Cassandra, her older sister and confidante, a large dowry. Austen lived at the Steventon rectory for 25 years. She never married, although she had more than a passing interest in romance and the society of her peers. Indeed, her keen observation of the society around her is mirrored in her novels, which reflect the manners and morals of her time, the conventions of courtship and marriage, and the psychology of human relationships.

      Between 1795 and 1798, Austen wrote the original versions of three novels: Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice. However, none of these books was published until well after her father's death (1805) after which Mrs. Austen and her daughters moved from Bath (where the family had lived from 1801 until Mr. Austen's death) to Southampton briefly and then to Chawton, where they lived in a house provided by Jane's wealthy brother, Edward. Sense and Sensibility appeared anonymously in 1811, and two years later, Pride and Prejudice, the novel that made her reputation. In 1814, Austen published Mansfield Park.

      Jane Austen received a minimal formal education at the Abbey School in Reading, which she left at age nine. In her time, it was not usual for a woman of the genteel classes to attend school; rather, she would be expected to attain certain accomplishments (singing, sewing, drawing, a speaking knowledge of French, letter writing) to prepare her for an advantageous marriage. Respectable careers (except for those of governess or school teacher) were not open to women, and being married was much preferable to working outside the home. Austen, like most women of her class, was educated at home and read from the books in her father's library. Evident in all her novels is a pointed satire leveled at women who define themselves chiefly by their ability to attract the opposite sex while ignoring the improvement of their minds.

      Although Austen was at work on her last novel, Persuasion, in 1815, it was published posthumously (along with Northanger Abbey which she had written earlier in 1797); Emma was the last book to see publication before her death. Austen died July 18, 1817, of Addison's Disease. She was forty-one years old. She is buried in Winchester Cathedral.

      Plot Summary

      Volume 1

      Austen introduces most of the major characters in Volume 1, with the exceptions of Jane Fairfax, Frank Churchill, and Mrs.

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