Illustration by C. E. Brock, 1909, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

One of Jane Austen’s many mind-bending skills was her ability to wrest so much drama from a world that was, by present-day standards, almost unfathomably static. Austen’s novels are preindustrial time capsules from an era before even trains, gas lights, or telegraphs—the first in a stampede of inventions that transformed nineteenth-century life and are vividly present in the work of many novelists emblematic of that century. Born in 1775, a year before American Independence, Austen has preserved for us an epoch when indoor illumination required candles, remote communication took place by messenger or mail, and locomotion meant walking or engaging at least one horse—more if, like Emma’s protagonist and namesake (and indeed every woman in that novel), you didn’t ride, and needed a carriage to travel any distance.

Austen’s fourth published novel is the most physically constricted of her works, which makes it also the most virtuosic. Unlike Austen’s other protagonists, Emma Woodhouse never spends a night away from home. That home is in fictional Highbury, “a large and populous village almost amounting to a town,” whose sixteen-mile distance from London might as well be six hundred. There is no sense of change in Highbury—neither past nor immanent; sociological nor technological—but rather of generations quietly living out their lives. The action occurs mostly indoors except for two group outings—one to pick strawberries and another to picnic nearby. The men move about more freely, coming and going on horseback, but the women mostly stay put, and Emma is especially stationary. She seems never to have traveled in her life, and remarks at one point that she hasn’t seen the ocean.

The causes of Emma’s insularity are structural. She is the only Austen heroine to occupy the pinnacle of the society she inhabits. Her family is old and estimable, placing much of the population beneath her notice and leaving her with little to aspire to—particularly as she has vowed never to marry. Her mother died when she was a child; her elder sister has married and moved to London and is now a mother of five. Emma is left to serve the wants of their fussy, demanding father, a comically fearful hypochondriac to whom she is deeply devoted. Mr. Woodhouse requires his daughter’s constant presence to entertain, reassure, and protect him from a world where nearly everything registers as a life-threatening danger, be it a dusting of snow or a slice of wedding cake.

The wedding cake is a feature of the novel’s catalyzing event: the marriage of Emma’s erstwhile governess—now intimate friend—to Mr. Weston, a cheerful widower. Mrs. Weston’s removal from the Woodhouse estate to begin married life a half mile away is seen as catastrophic by Mr. Woodhouse, who opposes change of any kind, but the real catastrophe is Emma’s. Despite taking pride in believing she “made the match” between the Westons, the removal of her friend costs Emma a beloved confidante and intellectual equal; a surrogate mother-cum-sister; and a companion and helpmate in dealing with her querulous father. “How was she to bear the change?” Austen asks in the first pages of the novel, and the question is existential.

Anxious to fill the chasm left by her friend, Emma hastily embraces Harriet Smith, a girl of uncertain parentage (i.e., someone’s extramarital child) just finishing at a local boarding school. Pretty Harriet is Emma’s social and intellectual inferior, which allows Emma to commandeer the younger girl as a kind of project, with the goal of raising her tone, awakening her intellect and getting her well married. Emma’s condescension toward her subservient friend is cringe-inducing, as Austen well knew; even before beginning Emma, she wrote, “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” Emma is imperfect to be sure, prone to snobbery and hauteur and far too confident in her own faulty judgment. Her most vocal critic is Mr. Knightley, brother of Emma’s sister’s husband, an old family friend and neighbor sixteen years Emma’s senior. “Mr. Knightley in fact, was one of the few people who could see faults in Emma Woodhouse, and the only one who ever told her of them,” Austen writes. Mr. Knightley warns both Mrs. Weston and Emma of the wrongheadedness of her fast friendship with Harriet and is proven right: that friendship initiates a series of miscalculations by Emma that form the engine of the plot.

Emma has been called a detective novel, and with good reason: the fun of first reading it consists largely in scrutinizing the suspects and trying to figure out not whodunnit but whowilldoit—as in who will marry whom. Austen’s ability to mystify the reader on this point despite her tiny cast of eligible singles and the limits placed upon their choices by rank and class, is something close to magic. As with any good detective story, the reader cascades through a series of misapprehensions that snap away like trapdoors, prompting a delicious sense of free fall as one assumed reality yields to another. Finally, Emma and the reader arrive at the biggest surprise of all: the answer to a mystery we didn’t realize were trying to solve until the moment of discovery.

The pleasure of rereading Emma lies partly in seeing how Austen pulled it off—the red herrings and double entendres that mislead both Emma and the reader about what is really going on. But because the pleasure of first reading Emma requires obfuscation, I urge first-timers and those who have forgotten the novel’s details to set down this introduction and return to it after you have finished. Why forfeit the delight of surprise?

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Along with setting in motion Emma’s plot, the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Weston introduces an axiom of its fictional world: marrying outside one’s rank, even for love, is unlikely to produce happiness. Mr. Weston, “born of a respectable family, which for the last two or three generations had been rising into gentility and property” fell in love as a young man with a woman from “a great Yorkshire family.” Her brother opposed their union, but she loved Mr. Weston and married him anyway. “It was an unsuitable connection, and did not produce much happiness,” Austen writes. “[Mrs. Weston] had resolution enough to pursue her own will in spite of her own brother, but not enough to refrain from unreasonable regrets at that brother’s unreasonable anger, nor from missing the luxuries of her former home.” She died three years later, leaving him a son, Frank—whom his childless brother- and sister-in-law offered to raise as their own and make their heir.

Less explicit but equally present is an assumption that genuine love must be felt on both sides for a marriage to succeed. Such stringent competing demands would seem to ask the impossible from the tiny world of Highbury; where are qualified candidates supposed to come from? Small wonder that Emma can’t conceive of ever meeting a man who could satisfy both—though she does harbor a faint romantic inclination toward Mr. Weston’s absent son, Frank Churchill, largely because she has never seen him. In a community where social interaction consists largely of repetition, outsiders are a source of fascinating novelty.

Emma is more immediately entertained by matrimonial pursuits by proxy. Convinced that she has a gift for matchmaking, she persuades the pliant Harriet to reject a marriage proposal from Robert Martin, the gentleman farmer she is clearly in love with, and manages to reroute her friend’s affections toward Mr. Elton, the newish vicar of Highbury and an attractive bachelor. But Emma badly misreads Mr. Elton’s attentions; she, not Harriet, turns out to be the object of his ardor (the scene of his failed proposal is exquisite), and Harriet is left crushed.

Emma’s destructive meddling, not to mention her ugly expressions of snobbery, can be hard to take. Of Robert Martin she loftily declares, “The yeomanry are precisely the order of people with whom I feel I can have nothing to do. A degree or two lower, and a creditable appearance might interest me … but a farmer can need none of my help, and is therefore in one sense as much above my notice as in every other he is below it.” Her alienating qualities are offset by laudable ones, however: infinite patience with her difficult father; the vulnerability inherent in being so often wrong; an unsparing willingness to own up to her mistakes, and a total lack of personal vanity. As Mr. Knightley puts it, “Considering how very handsome she is, she appears to be little occupied with it; her vanity lies another way.”

This rare instance of praise for Emma from the hypercritical Mr. Knightley is the first in a trail of breadcrumbs Austen lays toward the startling revelation, late in the novel, of their mutual love. Balancing surprise with inevitability is the holy grail of successful fiction, and it’s worth looking closely at how Austen pulls this off—especially since Mr. Knightley is the only man in the novel who meets the dual criteria of belovedness and class equality with Emma. Austen uses literary sleight of hand to obscure this obvious truth: She introduces Mr. Knightley as an elder; a quasi–family member (Emma refers to him once as a brother, which he immediately disavows: another breadcrumb); a confirmed bachelor; and above all, as being nonplussed by nearly every aspect of Emma’s character. At various points he deems her overindulged, thoughtless, headstrong, callous, unfulfilled in her potential, and damaging to Harriet. His cleareyed assessment of Emma’s flaws, and her readiness to hear him out and stand up to him, have the happy effect of making both more sympathetic, as well as strengthening our awareness of their subtle affinity.

Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax operate as narrative foils for Mr. Knightley and Emma, scrambling the inevitability of their eventual union. Frank and Jane have similar biographies; both were half or fully orphaned as young children and have been raised outside Highbury by surrogate families. Frank proves handsome and charming when he finally arrives, and Emma briefly believes she is in love with him. Jane Fairfax, a longstanding object of collective local reverence, is presented as a more perfect version of Emma: an acknowledged beauty; a diligent and accomplished musician (compared to Emma’s desultory efforts); and immediately sympathetic—for, despite her high birth, she is consigned to a future as a governess. Mr. Knightley praises Jane at Emma’s expense, and Mrs. Weston speculates to Emma that he may be in love with Jane. Naturally, Emma detests Jane and Mr. Knightley detests Frank, and the breadcrumbs continue to fall.

The almost mathematical symmetries of Emma’s architecture belie the suspense and lively humor of reading the novel. Much of the comedy surrounds the vicar, Mr. Elton, who repairs to Bath after being rejected by Emma and returns with the fantastically awful Mrs. Elton, a pretentious blatherer who refers to her husband as her “Cara Sposa” and “lord and master” and brags obsessively about her well-married sister’s estate. Watching Mrs. Elton’s coarse self-regard collide with Highbury’s strict class hierarchy is endless fun. Mrs. Elton refers to Mr. Knightley as “Knightley” and dares to suggest that she and Emma form a musical group—presumptions that, in today’s parlance, make Emma’s head explode.

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In the end, Emma’s marriage to Mr. Knightley affirms the notion that class parity is essential to happy wedlock. Shortly before Emma realizes that she is in love with her brother-in-law, she experiences a kind of epiphany while gazing upon his property: “Emma felt an increasing respect for it, as the residence of a family of such true gentility, untainted in blood and understanding … [her sister] had connected herself unexceptionably. She had given them neither men, nor names, nor places, that could raise a blush.”

Reverence for untainted blood is likely to land uneasily among present-day readers, along with the revelation that Mr. Knightley has been in love with Emma since she was thirteen (and he twenty-nine). The latter would not have shocked in Austen’s time; girls often married as teenagers. But Emma’s marriage to Mr. Knightley would seem to ratify her faith in the superiority of pure blood, and raises the question of whether Emma, the novel, partakes of Emma Woodhouse’s class arrogance. It’s true that Emma walks back some of her haughty positions; she accepts a dinner invitation from the trade-affiliated Coles rather than be excluded (pleased, on arrival, to be “given all the consequence she could wish for.”) And her early disparagement of Robert Martin gives way to a more generous sentiment, “It would be a great pleasure to know Robert Martin,” when Emma learns that he and Harriet will marry after all. Still, the novel makes clear that the class difference between Emma and Harriet will hereafter be observed. “The intimacy between her and Emma must sink; their friendship must change into a calmer sort of goodwill; and, fortunately, what ought to be, and must be, seemed already beginning, and in the most gradual, natural manner.”

If we knew nothing of Austen’s life or works outside of Emma, we might be excused for supposing the author herself to have embodied Emma Woodhouse’s hermetic aristocratic leanings. But as Claire Tomalin’s wonderfully readable biography, Jane Austen: A Life, and Lucy Worsley’s recent, lively Jane Austen at Home make clear, nothing of the sort was true: Austen was one of eight children born to a clergyman in Steventon, a town comparable to the fictional Highbury. To earn extra income for his immense family, her father boarded male pupils in the manner of Mrs. Goddard, whose school Harriet Smith attends in Emma. Austen came of age in a boisterous household teeming with boys (she had one sister, Cassandra, her inseparable life companion). Later, as an unmarried woman without an income, Austen lived at the pleasure of her parents, who housed her, and her brothers, whose many children she was expected to entertain during frequent visits.

When Austen’s parents made the choice to leave the family home in Steventon and move to Bath, Jane—twenty-five and still unpublished despite years of writing—had no alternative but to go along. She is said to have fainted when told of this move, and its disruption seems to have jarred her from her writing for many years. Only after settling a decade later into a house belonging to her brother Edward (who, like Frank Churchill, was raised by wealthier relatives as their heir) did Austen begin to publish. During her many years of financially dependent adulthood, the unmarried Austen’s worldly status would have been closer to that of Miss Bates, the logorrheic spinster in Emma, than to Emma Woodhouse. When Emma tells Harriet, “A single woman, with a very narrow income, must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid! the proper sport of boys and girls,” she might have been describing Jane Austen. Toward the end of Austen’s short life (she died of an illness at forty-one) the success of her novels finally granted her a first taste of financial freedom. Emma was the last novel published in her lifetime; Persuasion and Northanger Abbey appeared posthumously.

Apart from Emma Woodhouse, all of Austen’s protagonists grapple with some form of uncomfortable financial dependence. Elizabeth Bennett of Pride and Prejudice is one of five unmoneyed sisters; Anne Elliot of Persuasion is punished and rejected by her pompous aristocratic father for falling in love with a ship captain (the profession of two of Austen’s brothers); Fanny Price of Mansfield Park is a second-class citizen in the home of her wealthy aunt and uncle; Elinor Dashwood of Sense and Sensibility is considered beneath the man she loves and viewed as a threat by his family. And Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey is turned out of the house of the man she hopes to marry when his father discovers that she is one of a clergyman’s ten children. All of these heroines triumph by marrying for love across class, thus defying the marital logic presented, in Emma, as natural law.

Emma is anomalous among Austen’s oeuvre for not taking on class elitism as one of its subjects. Rather, the novel transports us to a hierarchical enclave so ancient and inflexible that it cannot be defied without damage. Despite the rigid predictability of this world, Austen manages to keep us guessing to the end. And she inhabits Emma’s point of view so persuasively that her own colorful, populous, contradictory history is impossible to detect. There is a word for all of this: genius!

This essay is excerpted from the introduction to a new edition of Emma, to be published by Vintage Books in July.

Jennifer Egan is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of  The Invisible Circus, Look at Me, The Keep, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Manhattan Beach, The Candy House, and the story collection Emerald City. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares, and her nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine.