The 100 best novels
written in English
No 07
Emma by Jane Austen
(1816)
Robert McCrum
Monday 4 November 2013 07.01 GMT
H
ow on earth to choose just one Jane Austen novel? Austen, for some, is simply the supreme English novelist, on any list. Some will say: she is the greatest. Nominate all six, from Pride and Prejudice on. But the rules of our selection only allow one title per author: there has to be a choice. So, to represent her fiction here, I've chosen Emma for three particular reasons.
First, it's my personal favourite, a mature and brilliant comedy of manners (and much more besides) completed towards the end of her life. Second, published by John Murray, Emma takes us into a new literary landscape, the beginnings of a book world that lingers unto the 21st century. And third, most importantly of all, Austen's last novel has the sparkle of early books such as Pride and Prejudice, mixed with a sharper and deeper sensibility. There's no accounting for taste: I simply prefer it to the others.
Emma was written in a white heat – according to the scholars – between 21 January 1814 and 29 March 1815 (the year of Waterloo), and it comes as the climax to a remarkable period of intense creativity. Pride and Prejudice (whose first draft, "First Impressions", was written in 1796-7) had been published in 1813, Mansfield Park in 1814. Austen's work was becoming something of a cult, and she was aware of her audience. Indeed, the Prince Regent was a fan (Emma is dedicated to him). Austen must have been conscious that she was no longer writing just for herself. She was at the peak of her powers, yet had less than two years to live. All this, I think, gives Emma an added depth as the final flowering of a great artist and her work.
Gwyneth Paltrow and Toni Collette in Emma (1996) 'The novel is supremely English – in character, landscape, sensibility and wit.' Photograph: Allstar/ Cinetext/ Miramax |
The novelist herself is highly conscious of her art. Emma, she wrote to a friend, is "a heroine whom no one but myself will much like". Perhaps. However, compared with her other heroines – Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, Anne Elliot, and Catherine Morland – Emma is the most complex, subtle and complete. Yes, she is "handsome, clever and rich". But she's only 21 and will be sent on the familiar Austen cycle of wrong-headedness, remorse, repentance and ultimate self-realisation (with Mr Knightley) in a far deeper way than her predecessors.
Emma represents mature Austen in another way, too. She has perfected the art of free indirect speech to convey the inner life of her heroine while retaining her control of the narrative as the omniscient author. Light and shade are expertly and satisfyingly in harmony, and the novel's deceptively simple plot is spun into so much teasing variety, through games, letters and riddles – the book is exceedingly playful – that the reader is never less than fully engaged, even charmed. Then there's Austen's mature delight in her milieu. She herself famously wrote that "three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on", and Emma's Highbury exemplifies this credo. Here, fully in command of her genre, Austen revels in her characters and their foibles. Mr Woodhouse, Mr and Mrs Elton, poor Miss Bates, Jane Fairfax and her fiance, deceitful Frank Churchill and, of course, noble Mr Knightley – these are among the most vivid and universal characters in English fiction, as real to us as Pickwick or Jeeves.
Emma herself is endlessly fascinating, a woman to whom the reader returns again and again for the seductive intimacy of her thoughts, a secret communion that's braided with the lesson that self-knowledge is a mystery, vanity the source of the worst pain, and the subconscious a treacherous and imperfect instrument in the management of the psyche. You can object that Emma is a lady and a snob, but she also makes a timeless appeal to the reader's better nature.
Austen seems to have known that she was working on something special. Mansfield Park had been published by Thomas Egerton. This time, however, she wanted better terms and more literary prestige. There was only one address for that: 50 Albemarle Street, Mayfair. She approached John Murray, Byron's publisher, offering her new manuscript. Murray accepted at once and his edition appeared in December 1815, after a trouble-free editorial process in which her new publisher made a point of treating her with the greatest respect, though author and publisher never actually met.
Emma occupies a special place in this list because it is supremely English – in character, landscape, sensibility and wit. It's provincial, opaque, sparkling and wonderfully optimistic while being at the same time tinged with intimations of sorrow and mortality. In the end, it answers Jane Austen's own high-spirited prescription for the novel, expressed in Northanger Abbey: "in short, only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language".
A Note on the Text:
There was just one text prepared in Austen's lifetime, the John Murray edition, dated 1816, though it was actually published in three volumes in December 1815. No manuscript survives. Subsequent editions, notably by RW Chapman, have made silent corrections to typographical errors, but no substantial emendations. Emma has been continuously in print since its first publication: that's one definition of a classic.
Other Austen Titles:
Sense and Sensibility (1811); Pride and Prejudice (1813); Mansfield Park (1814); Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, published posthumously in 1817.
THE GUARDIAN
THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
070 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)
THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
001 The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)
002 Robinson Crusoe by Danie Defoe (1719)
003 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
004 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (1748)
005 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)
007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
008 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
009 Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock(1818)
011 Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli (1845)
012 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)
015 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)
016 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
017 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
019 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)
020 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)
021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)
023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)
024 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
025 Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (1889)
026 The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)
027 The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)
028 New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)
029 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)
030 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)
031 Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
033 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)
034 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)
035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
037 Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)
038 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908)
039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
053 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
055 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)
070 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
071 The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)
072 The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)
073 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
074 Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
075 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
076 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
077 Voss by Patrick White (1957)
078 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
080 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)
082 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
083 A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964)
084 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)
086 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)
088 Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)
089 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)
090 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979)
091 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
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