Emma Woodhouse's story is about what it's like to be a side character in a Jane Austen novel.
Emma doesn't have an Austen heroine's story. She's not leaving home. She's not in danger of losing her home. She already has a comfortable home, and she's the beloved mistress of it. She doesn't have to worry about money, doesn't need to marry, and doesn't have any desire to marry. Yet she gets to be a supporting character in other Austen stories.
Harriet is the heroine of a Persuasion story--she falls in love at a very young age, and is persuaded to refuse him because of his low rank. She gets the Anne Elliot moment of rushing into a shop to avoid the rain, and unexpectedly encountering the man she rejected. She even gets the Lizzie Bennet moment of seeing a beautiful view of the house and grounds that could have been hers if she'd accepted his marriage proposal. Emma is the Lady Russell who persuades her out of a love match, but she's only a bystander for these other parts of the story.
Jane Fairfax is a poor orphan who has no home of her own, only friends and relatives to stay with. She and Frank have an entire romance plot happening off the page, but Emma gets only the barest glimpses of it. Emma has to piece together the truth based on the little she knows, and she gets it wildly wrong. But that's what you'd expect from a side character. Everyone was surprised when Darcy and Lizzie got engaged--from an outside perspective, no one else could see their convoluted romance plot. This book gives us that outside perspective--puts us on the periphery of the story instead of right in the middle of it.
Emma does get her own romance and her own happy ending, but for most of the book, she's at the edge of other people's stories. And it feels a bit like Austen's showing that you don't need to be the center of the story to have a story worth telling.
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