It is no secret that Emma is my favourite Jane Austen novel, Emma herself my favourite heroine and Mr Knightley easily my favourite Jane Austen hero (the only other man who could possible compete with him is the delightful Mr Tilney). Part of the joy of reading Speaking of Jane Austen by Sheila Kaye-Smith and G.B. Stern (which I will eventually get around to reviewing) was that they are just as enthusiastic about the book as I am. For once in a book about Jane Austen, Emma is the novel which gets the most attention.
Emma has always had more fans that Austen perhaps expected it to (with her talk of “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like”) but far fewer than it deserves. I have adored it since I first read it as a thirteen-year old so found G.B. Stern’s response to why most young readers do not warm to Emma very interesting:
A mistress of English literature in one of our modern schools told me recently that among her older pupils, Emma was the least popular of Miss Austen’s heroines; the girls all exclaim in disgust: ‘She’s such a snob!’ There is no argument against that; Emma is a snob; and if we try to persuade them ‘but she’s a delicious snob’, a blankness steals upon the air; for in your ‘teens you are almost bound to have a sternly uncompromising attitude towards life, and the adjective ‘delicious’ is incompatible when linked with ‘snob’.
Anyhow, one must not take refuge in an adjective. What exactly do I mean by my statement that Emma is a delicious snob? Probably that snobbery can be condoned and even enjoyed when the author is herself on your side, knows all about it and is, indeed, suing this very snobbery as her theme: this deliciously youthful assumption of Miss Woodhouse that at the age of nearly twenty-one she knew everything, could prove all hearts, arrange suitable marriages and destroy marriages that she deemed unsuitable, guide and instruct Harriet, be saucy to Mr Knightley, and generally behave for the first half of the book in a fashion which takes the whole of the second half of the book to undo, disprove and learn again. Jane Austen was nearing forty when she wrote Emma; she could look back on youth, tolerant towards its intolerance, its impetuosity, its glorious sweeping assumptions. She knows well that Emma is a snob, but a snob to be forgiven; a snob who will fall into mistakes, and yet later learn of her mistakes, confess them and begin again more soberly. That is the lesson of the book. But you cannot expect a schoolgirl to treat Emma’s over confident remarks and instructions with the same forgiveness; youth will bang down the book and declare that Emma is impossible, awful; youth will pick up the book again and in scornful tones read aloud that passage, perhaps, where Emma holds forth to Harriet against the pretentious Mr Martin, a mere farmer…
If you cannot smile at this, not a superior smile, but loving Emma, touched by her girlhood and ignorance, if you cannot smile at it, then Emma is lost; and though the book can be read for the interest of its story, it will never be a favourite.
The Captive Reader 
Lovely quotation. I used to have a similar problem with some young university students, and this really explains why! I love Emma too — I can never say which JA is my favourite as it’s usually the last one I read, but Emma is definitely a contender. Thanks.
Who is the gal in the picture? I can’t recall her from any of the adaptations I have seen?
It’s Romola Garai, from the 2009 television miniseries.
Thanks. She looks different in every part she plays.
One of my favourites as well. When I was younger, I was so sympathetic to Emma’s impatience with Miss Bates and the oh-so-annoying Jane Fairfax. Now I feel so much more for them both – poor Jane with Frank Churchill to manage!
Nothing wrong with snobs, in literature at any rate – look at Angela Thirkell! I did Emma for A level in the early 1950s, loved her then and ever since.
My mother, an English teacher, loved Emma and was always talking highly of it to my disgust as a teenager. I never understood her love of that snob. Now I’m older and now I love Emma more than them all! How in the world will I get my teenage niece to see how delicious is the character of Emma?!
I think I am going to start referring to myself as a delicious snob. 🙂
That is an interesting way to describe a young person’s response to Emma. I think I read it for the first time when I was seventeen or eighteen, after a couple of failed attempts with it. The first time I actually sat down and read it straight through was when I was in late high school or early college, though, and I have loved it ever since. If Mr. Knightley were more fun OR if Emma and Mr. Knightley had gone to live in their own damn house at the end of the book, I would say this one was my clear and strong favorite. As it is I am always torn between it and Pride and Prejudice.
BTW, the Times Literary Supplement of Feb. 8 has a long review of four new publications on Jane Austen or her novels, including what is supposed to be an amazing “annotated edition” of Emma published by Harvard UP. Another one is called “A Dance with Jane Austen: How a Novelist and her Characters went to the Ball.”