Jane Austen

Emma Jane Austen

Emma is a novel by the Englishwoman Jane Austen, published anonymously (A Novel, December 1815, by the author of Sense and Sensibility and Pride) Mocking the attempts of the heroine to make meet the bachelors of his entourage the ideal spouse, painted with humor the life and problems of the provincial class wealthy under the Regency. Emma is considered by some Austrians to be her most accomplished work. Considered by Sir Walter Scott as a herald of a new kind of more realistic novel, Emma first disconcerts her contemporaries by the meticulous description of a small provincial town, where not much happens outside the events of The daily life of the community. Another essential aspect is that of the novel of learning, the learning of life by Emma herself, who, despite the vivacity of her mind, struggles so much to understand the feelings of others and her own. Other aspects of the novel, taken later, may also surprise us, such as its character of "crime novel without murder", which only a thorough re-reading allows to fully appreciate. Emma has been the subject of several translations in French, the first just one year after its publication in England. After a "forgetfulness" of a hundred years, the novel was serialized in the Journal des débats in 1910; As is often the case in Jane Austen's French translations, the irony and the "second degree" proper to the author disappear in the adaptation that is made of it. The work has since been regularly published in French, in more or less faithful translations-adaptations.