The Scorecard
In Jane Austen’s Emma, Emma Woodhouse says out loud that she made a match herself, and she says it with pride. So here is my question. Over the whole novel, how many of her matches actually work? This is a full summary, so it spoils everything, the ending included.
I will go one match at a time and score each one. You get the plot, the people and a few counts. Every count is mine.
The Text
I read the Project Gutenberg text, ebook number one hundred and fifty-eight, released on August first, nineteen ninety-four. I give no first publication date, because I could not source one twice.
By my count the story runs about one hundred and fifty-seven thousand words, in three volumes and fifty-five chapters. Volume one has eighteen chapters and about forty-eight and a half thousand words. Volume two has eighteen chapters and about fifty-three thousand. Volume three has nineteen chapters and about fifty-six thousand. I left out the license and the contents.
The whole book happens in one village, Highbury, and the houses around it. No trips, no battles, no villains. The suspense is who will end up with whom.
Match Zero
Start with the match that worked. Emma Woodhouse is handsome, clever and rich, and she is nearly twenty-one. She runs her father’s house, Hartfield, in Highbury. Her mother died long ago. As the book opens, her governess and closest friend, Miss Taylor, has just married a neighbor, Mr. Weston, and moved to a house called Randalls.
Emma tells Mr. Knightley that she made that match herself, four years ago, when people said Mr. Weston would never marry again. Mr. Knightley is about seven or eight and thirty, an old friend of the family, and the elder brother of her sister Isabella’s husband. He lives a mile away at Donwell Abbey. He shakes his head at her.
Her father, Mr. Woodhouse, dislikes change, late hours and large dinners. The word gruel appears nine times in the text.
So the score is one match, one success. Now Emma wants another.
Match One
Her next project is Harriet Smith, a pretty girl who boards at Mrs. Goddard’s school. The text says she is the natural daughter of somebody. Emma decides to improve her and find her a husband.
But Harriet already has an offer. Robert Martin, a farmer at Abbey-Mill Farm, proposes by letter. Emma talks Harriet into saying no, because she thinks a farmer is beneath her friend. Mr. Knightley is angry. He tells Emma she has been no friend to Harriet Smith, and that Martin is a better man than she thinks. They quarrel.
Emma’s choice is the vicar, Mr. Elton. He praises Harriet’s portrait. He brings a charade whose answer is courtship, and Emma reads it as a love poem for Harriet.
Then, after a dinner at Randalls on a winter evening, Emma ends up alone in a carriage with Mr. Elton, and he declares his love. Not for Harriet. For Emma. She refuses him, and he is shocked, because he thought she had encouraged him. He leaves for Bath. Harriet is heartbroken, and Emma sits down that night to be miserable.
Score for match one: nothing. One success in two tries.
Match Two
Volume one ends with a letter of excuse. Frank Churchill, Mr. Weston’s son, will not be visiting just yet. He was raised by his uncle and aunt at Enscombe, and he does not carry his father’s name. All winter, Highbury talks about him, and Emma has half decided to fall for him.
Volume two brings Jane Fairfax, the orphan niece of the talkative Miss Bates. Emma cannot warm to her. Jane’s best friend, Miss Campbell, has just married a Mr. Dixon. Then a pianoforte arrives for Jane, and nobody knows who sent it. Emma decides it came from Mr. Dixon, and that Jane is secretly in love with her friend’s husband. She even shares this theory with Frank.
Frank does arrive, and he is charming. He travels to London just to have his hair cut. A ball is planned at the Crown Inn, and then a summons from his aunt calls him home before it can happen. Emma feels dull and listless, and decides she must be in love with him.
And Mr. Elton returns from Bath with a bride, Mrs. Elton. She is loud, self-important and always mentions her sister at Maple Grove. She calls her husband Mr. E., and she takes Jane under her wing.
Score for match two: nothing. Emma and Frank is not a match, and Jane and Mr. Dixon is a story Emma invented. Still one success.
Match Three
Volume three. The ball happens at last. Mr. Elton refuses to dance with Harriet, in front of everyone, and Mr. Knightley, who had not been dancing, leads her out himself.
The next morning, Frank Churchill walks into Hartfield with Harriet on his arm. She fainted after gypsies frightened her on the Richmond road, and he came upon her. Emma sees a romance: a rescue, a young man, a grateful girl.
Harriet burns her treasures, a bit of court plaster and the end of a pencil, both Mr. Elton’s. She says she is cured, and she hints at someone new. Emma assumes it is Frank. Remember that, because it matters in a few pages.
Box Hill
Summer. Mr. Knightley invites everyone to eat his strawberries at Donwell. Then comes the party to Box Hill, and it goes badly. Frank flirts loudly with Emma. Everyone feels flat.
Frank announces Emma’s game. Each person must say one clever thing, or three dull ones. Miss Bates laughs and says she will manage three dull things at once. Emma answers that she will be limited to three. Miss Bates blushes.
At the carriage, Mr. Knightley tells her it was badly done. Miss Bates is poor, she has sunk from the comforts she was born to, and Emma has known her since she was a child. Emma cries all the way home. The next morning she visits Miss Bates to make amends, and finds Jane looking very ill. Mr. Knightley leaves for London.
The Secret
Then Mrs. Churchill dies. Ten days later Mr. Weston asks Emma to come to Randalls, and Mrs. Weston tells her: Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax have been secretly engaged since October. It began at Weymouth. They told no one.
So the pianoforte was Frank’s, and Mr. Dixon was nothing. Emma’s first thought is Harriet, whom she let hope for Frank, and she dreads telling her. But Mr. Weston has already told Harriet, and Harriet is calm. She says she never meant Frank at all. She means Mr. Knightley, who danced with her. Matches of greater distance have happened, she says, in Emma’s own words.
Emma sits still for a few minutes. In that time, the book says, she learns her own heart. It darts through her that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself.
The Final Score
So here is the scorecard. Match zero, Miss Taylor and Mr. Weston: success, but before the book begins. Match one, Harriet and Mr. Elton: failure. Match two, Emma and Frank, and Jane and Mr. Dixon: invented. Match three, Harriet and Frank: also invented. Zero for four, once the book opens.
Here is my reading, and it is an opinion. Emma’s real fault is not matchmaking. It is that she builds a story and then reads every fact as proof of it. Every person is a clue to her, never a person. The book is how she learns the difference.
And the matches that do work, she did not plan. How the book ends, who marries whom, and what her father says, is in my ending video.
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