Show notes
Emma Woodhouse is twenty-one, wealthy, comfortably certain she understands everyone in her village, and convinced she will never marry. She takes up matchmaking. It goes badly. Full spoilers throughout.
Alex and Lindsey get into whether Emma is the most unreliable narrator they’ve read, Austen’s habit of letting every character pick one interpretation and then read the entire world through it, and how Jane Fairfax and Harriet Smith work as measuring sticks for Emma’s growth and Knightley’s. They also spend real time on Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates as social vampires, two characters still capable of inducing anxiety through the page two centuries later. Then they arrive at two different answers about what Emma actually learns, and try to work out whether the sixteen year age gap survives a modern reading.
Plus: Clueless, the difficulty of the prose, and a disagreement about who is punching up.
Cry count and ratings at the end.