ABSTRACT
It might be said of Jane Austen's comic masterpiece Emma that no other novel has a greater power of making its detractors look foolish. For detractors it has had—precisely, one suspects, because it is so patently a work of genius. The unpretentious yet perfectly calibrated style, the deeply intransigent female wit, the self-confident moral sense—the sheer unencumbered fearlessness of it all—in-evitably infuriate he-men of both sexes. Witness Charlotte Brontë, in a famous letter to a friend from 1850, jealously assailing the spinster Austen for a supposed dearth of passionate feeling:
[What] the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of Life and the sentient target of death—this Miss Austen ignores; she no more, with her mind's eye, beholds the heart of her race than each man, with bodily vision sees the heart in his heaving breast. 1
