Jane Austen’s irony thrives in the seams and slippages between satire and sentiment: She was a withering observer of the vanity of human wishes while understanding all too well those who suffer from it. Her 1815 classic, Emma, follows the story of Emma Woodhouse, the wealthiest of Austen's heroines, a young woman addicted to match-making (often with disastrous results) and delicately blends irony and earnestness. The new film adaptation, starring Anya Taylor-Joy in the title role, derives its disarming momentum from this same mix. Directed by Autumn de Wilde, the movie is not just one of the most stylish Austen films in recent memory—it's also one of the most faithful.
When Austen wrote Emma, she was 39, and it was the last of her novels she would see published in her lifetime. (Northanger Abbey and Persuasion both appeared posthumously.) The novel is also generally agreed to be Austen's finest technical achievement in the use of free-indirect discourse—the narrator's sly method for making readers privy to a character's inner monologue. On its release, it received a near-rapturous notice from Sir Walter Scott in The Quarterly Review, in which he praised Austen's evocation of real life and her ability to generate excitement without recourse to the heroics of historical fiction (Scott's own specialty). Noting that a novel should display a "depth of knowledge and dexterity of execution," Scott rejoices that Austen "has produced sketches of such spirit and originality, that we never miss the excitation which depends upon a narrative of uncommon events.... In this class, [Austen] stands almost alone.... The author's knowledge of the world, and the peculiar tact with which she presents characters that the reader cannot fail to recognize, reminds us something of the merits of the Flemish school of painting."
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