by P. D. James
Here again there is a subtle clue. Why should Mr. Knightley be so displeased at the suggestion he might be interested in Jane Fairfax, the beautiful, accomplished and elegant Jane? Surely it is not the gossip which has displeased him; Highbury lives by gossip. No, it is the thought that Emma can discuss the prospect of his marrying another woman with such apparent equanimity.
Then there is the long-deferred ball at the Crown, one of the most brilliant chapters in the book and one in which there are clues to all the relationships as well as the incident which gives rise to further misunderstanding when Mr. Knightley dances with Harriet and she first imagines that she is in love with him. The evening is packed with interesting little incidents. There is the moment when Mrs. Elton says to her husband:
“Oh! you have found us out at last, have you, in our seclusion?— I was this moment telling Jane, I thought you would begin to be impatient for tidings of us.”
“Jane!”—repeated Frank Churchill, with a look of surprise and displeasure.—“That is easy—but Miss Fairfax does not disapprove it, I suppose.”
Emma asks in a whisper:
“How do you like Mrs. Elton?”
“Not at all.”
“You are ungrateful.”
“Ungrateful!—What do you mean?” Then changing from a frown to a smile—“No, do not tell me!—I do not want to know what you mean.—Where is my father?—When are we to begin dancing?”
Emma could hardly understand him; he seemed in an odd humour.
Emma is referring to Mrs. Elton’s recent praise of Frank to his father. “A very fine young man indeed, Mr. Weston. A very handsome young man, and his manners are precisely what I like.” Frank, of course, thinks that Emma is referring to Mrs. Elton’s condescending kindness to his secret love.
Mrs. Elton, as the bride, opens the ball with Mr. Weston, with Frank Churchill and Emma following. But even when she is dancing with Mr. Churchill Emma’s eyes and thoughts are with Mr. Knightley. Jane Austen writes:
He could not have appeared to greater advantage perhaps anywhere, than where he had placed himself. His tall, firm, upright figure, among the bulky forms and stooping shoulders of the elderly men, was such as Emma felt must draw everybody’s eyes; and, excepting her own partner, there was not one among the whole row of young men who could be compared with him.—He moved a few steps nearer, and those few steps were enough to prove in how gentlemanlike a manner, with what natural grace, he must have danced, would he but take the trouble.
He does later take the trouble, when he leads out Harriet to the set after she has been disgracefully snubbed by Mr. Elton. But, at the end of the chapter, he dances with Emma.
“Whom are you going to dance with?” asked Mr. Knightley.
She hesitated a moment, and then replied, “With you, if you will ask me.”
“Will you?” said he, offering his hand.
“Indeed I will. You have shown that you can dance, and you know we are not really so much brother and sister as to make it at all improper.”
“Brother and sister! no, indeed.”
Those few words surely tell us all we need to know about Mr. Knightley’s feelings for Emma.
There is one moment of physical intimacy between Mr. Knightley and Emma which should in its delicacy and, for me, its erotic charge, tell us that they are in love. Mr. Knightley, obviously convinced that Emma and Frank Churchill will soon be engaged, unexpectedly determines to go and stay with his brother and Emma’s sister, and comes to Hartfield to take his leave. He cannot bear to be in Highbury when the engagement is announced. Emma has just returned from visiting Miss Bates to try to make amends for her deplorable unkindness at the Box Hill picnic. Learning from Mr. Woodhouse where Emma has been, Mr. Knightley looks at her “with a glow of regard, as if his eyes received the truth from hers, and all that had passed of good in her feelings were at once caught and honoured.” Jane Austen writes:
She was warmly gratified—and in another moment still more so, by a little movement of more than common friendliness on his part.—He took her hand;—whether she had not herself made the first motion, she could not say—she might, perhaps, have rather offered it—but he took her hand, pressed it, and certainly was on the point of carrying it to his lips—when from some fancy or other, he suddenly let it go … The intention, however, was indubitable … nothing became him more.—It was with him of so simple, yet so dignified a nature.
It is one of the most touching moments in the novel.
All detective stories have that final chapter or chapters in which the clues are explained, misunderstandings resolved, errors corrected and the truth at last revealed. Jane Austen does this in three ways. Mrs. Weston visits her daughter-in-law-to-be, then calls at Hartfield to explain to Emma the full story of Jane Fairfax’s ill-begun but now prosperous love from Jane’s point of view. We have Emma’s musings as she recalls with remorse her humiliating errors of understanding and offences against good taste. And we have Frank Churchill’s long explanatory, self-justifying letter to his stepmother, which Mrs. Weston, of course, shares with Emma. This device of explaining the mystery in epistolary form is not uncommon in detective fiction. In Frank’s letter the significance of all the moves in this game of love and misunderstanding are clearly explained. Jane Fairfax’s increasing unhappiness at the deception she was practising, his own sanguine expectations that somehow all would come right, his deliberate courting of Emma to divert attention while he was convinced that Emma herself was indifferent to him and, indeed, shared his secret, the quarrel with Jane Fairfax after the strawberry-picking and her letter breaking off the engagement. I suspect that when, as a girl, I first read Emma I was left wondering why I hadn’t seen it all myself.
And did they indeed live happily ever after? Mr. Woodhouse is made so miserable by Emma’s engagement that he can only be reconciled to the marriage by their suggestion that Mr. Knightley should live at Hartfield. As Mr. Elton says, “rather he than me.” G. B. Stern, in a book entitled More Talk of Jane Austen published in 1950, looks ahead for seven years and suggests that indeed there were great strains on the marriage when Mr. Knightley was required continually to suffer Mr. Woodhouse’s companionship while his and Emma’s children were at Donwell Abbey. G. B. Stern gets over the difficulty by conveniently killing off Mr. John Knightley so that Isabella can return to her father’s house. Emma takes her rightful place at Donwell Abbey.
Well, that is all conjecture and, as Frank Churchill says, “Sometimes one conjectures right, and sometimes one conjectures wrong.” I think that I shall choose to believe the author when she tells us so plainly at the end of Emma,
the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
P. D. JAMES is the author of sixteen previous books, many of which have been filmed and broadcast on television in the United States and other countries. She spent thirty years in various departments of the British Civil Service, including the Police and Criminal Law Departments of the Home Office. She has served as a magistrate and as a governor of the BBC. The recipient of many prizes and honors, she was created Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991. She lives in London and Oxford.
