The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

JANE AUSTEN'S least accurate prophecy as to the fate of her fictions concerned Emma, whose heroine, she thought, "no one but myself will much like. " Aside from much else, Emma is immensely likable, because she is so extraordinarily imaginative, dangerous and misguided as her imagination frequently must appear to others and finally to herself. On the scale of being, Emma constitutes an answer to the immemorial questions of the sublime: More? Equal to? Or less than? Like Clarissa Harlowe before her and the strongest heroines of George Eliot and Henry James after her, Emma Woodhouse has a heroic will and, like them, she risks identifying her will with her imagination. Socially considered, such identification is catastrophic, since the Protestant will has a tendency to bestow a ranking on other selves, and such ranking may turn out to be a personal phantasmagoria. G. Armour Craig rather finely remarked: "Society in Emma is not a ladder. It is a web of imputations that link feelings and conduct. " Yet Emma herself, expansionist rather than reductionist in temperament, imputes more fiercely and freely than the web can sustain, and she threatens always, until she is enlightened, to dissolve the societal links, in and for others, that might allow some stability between feelings and conduct.

Armour Craig usefully added, "Emma does not justify its heroine nor does it deride her. " Rather, it treats her with ironic love (not loving irony). Emma Woodhouse is dear to Jane Austen, because her errors are profoundly imaginative and rise from the will's passion for autonomy of vision. The splendid Jane Fairfax is easier to admire, but I cannot agree with Wayne Booth's awarding the honors to her over Emma, though I admire the subtle balance of his formulation: