Emma
“Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.” So begins Emma by Jane Austen, describing her leading character who, she said, was “a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like.” Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss this, one of Austen’s most popular novels and arguably her masterpiece, a brilliantly sparkling comedy of manners published in December 1815 by John Murray, the last to be published in Austen’s lifetime. This followed Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mansfield Park (1814), with her brother Henry handling publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1817).
Guests
- Janet Todd
3 episodes
Professor Emerita of Literature, University of Aberdeen and Honorary Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge - John Mullan
14 episodes
Professor of English at University College, London - Emma Clery
2 episodes
Professor of English at the University of Southampton
Reading list
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Jane Austen and the War of Ideas
Marilyn Butler (Oxford University Press, 1988) Google Books → -
The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen
Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (eds.) (Cambridge University Press, 2010) Google Books → -
A Fine Brush on Ivory: An Appreciation of Jane Austen
Richard Jenkyns (Oxford University Press, 2004) Google Books → -
Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel
Claudia Johnson (University of Chicago Press, 1988) Google Books → -
Jane Austen and the Enlightenment
Peter Knox-Shaw (Cambridge University Press, 2004) Google Books → -
Emma
David Monaghan (ed.) (Palgrave Macmillan, 1992) Google Books → -
Jane Austen and the Popular Novel
Anthony Mandal (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) Google Books → -
What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved
John Mullan (Bloomsbury, 2012) Google Books → -
Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation
Bharat Tandon (Anthem, 2003) Google Books → -
Jane Austen
Tony Tanner (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) Google Books → -
The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen
Janet Todd (Cambridge University Press, 2015) Google Books → -
The Hidden Jane Austen
John Wiltshire (Cambridge University Press, 2014) Google Books → -
Jane Austen and the Body
John Wiltshire (Cambridge University Press, 1992) Google Books →
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Programme ID: b06pd3b9
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06pd3b9
Auto-category: 823.7 (English fiction - 1800-1899)
Hello (First sentence from this episode)
Hello. At the end of 1815, the great London publisher John Murray brought out a novel by an anonymous writer identified as the author of Pride and Prejudice, etc, etc.