59 Fun Facts About Emma (Jane Austen)

Emma is set in which fictional village?

Highbury is just what Austen ordered: while writing Emma she told her niece Anna that 'three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on'.

In which English county is Jane Austen's Emma set?

Surrey puts Emma's village just sixteen miles from London, near enough for her to pack Harriet off to her sister's house in town when, late in the novel, she cannot bear to face her.

What is the name of the Woodhouse family home?

Hartfield is where Emma stays even as a bride: she will not leave her nervous father, so her husband leaves his own estate and moves in for as long as the old man lives.

Which estate, with extensive grounds and farms, belongs to Emma's neighbour and only critic?

Donwell Abbey must go to her little nephew Henry, Emma insists, so its owner must never marry. Then she marries him herself.

In Emma, which house do the newly married couple of the opening chapter make their home?

Randalls was the house its owner had long set his heart on. He would not settle down until he could afford it, so he made his money in business first, bought it, and only then married.

Emma was written at a cottage, now a museum to Jane Austen, in which village?

Chawton. Her brother Edward gave his mother and sisters a cottage on his estate there in 1809, and from that settled home Austen at last saw her novels into print, four of them by 1815, Emma the last.

Emma's publisher, John Murray, published which Romantic poet?

Lord Byron's publisher drove a hard bargain. Austen called Murray 'a rogue of course, but a civil one', refused his offer for her copyrights and had him publish Emma on commission instead.

To whom is Emma dedicated?

The Prince Regent kept her novels in each of his residences, and his librarian hinted she might dedicate the next to him. Austen disliked the Prince, but it was a request she could hardly refuse.

Jane Austen said of Emma, 'I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much' what?

Like. She put the prediction to the test, writing down what friends and family made of the book: her niece Fanny, she noted, 'could not bear Emma herself'.

Jane Austen's famous first sentence describes Emma Woodhouse as 'handsome, clever, and' what?

Rich enough, in fact, to do without a husband: she tells Harriet she has 'none of the usual inducements' to marry, wanting neither fortune, employment nor consequence.

What does Emma Woodhouse, who rarely finishes anything, complete for Harriet?

A portrait. The vicar admires it so warmly, even carrying it to London to be framed, that Emma is sure he loves the sitter, when it is really the artist he is after.

Emma's former governess, whose wedding opens the novel, was known as what before her marriage?

Miss Taylor spent sixteen years with the family, more friend than governess. Emma's father, who hates any change, can only pity the bride and goes on calling her 'poor Miss Taylor'.

Which vicar does Emma try to pair with Harriet Smith?

Mr Elton has been aiming higher all along: he proposes to Emma instead, and is insulted to learn that she meant him for Harriet, whom he thinks far beneath him.

Which respectable young farmer does Emma persuade Harriet to refuse?

Robert Martin proposes by letter, and Emma all but dictates the refusal. When he asks again at the end, Harriet says yes, and theirs is the first of the novel's three weddings.

After Emma rejects him, the vicar goes to which city and returns with a wife?

Bath does the trick: within weeks he is engaged to a woman said to have £10,000, which confirms Emma's view that he only ever wanted to marry a fortune.

In Emma, the vicar's boastful bride, forever praising Maple Grove, was known before her marriage as what?

Miss Hawkins arrives full of airs and Italian endearments: her husband is her 'caro sposo'. Emma privately sums her up as 'a little upstart, vulgar being'.

Frank Churchill was raised by his aunt and uncle at which Yorkshire estate?

Enscombe is ruled by Frank's imperious aunt, whose illnesses everyone takes for a ploy to keep him at her side. Then she dies suddenly, proving them wrong and leaving him free to marry.

Frank Churchill was born with which surname?

Weston. His mother's proud family, the Churchills, cast her off for marrying Captain Weston, then after her early death took in her little boy and gave him their name.

At which seaside town did Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax become secretly engaged?

Weymouth is also where Mr Dixon caught Jane as she was about to be swept off a boat, a rescue that Emma inflates into a secret romance with a married man.

Jane Fairfax lives in genteel poverty with her grandmother and which talkative aunt?

Miss Bates, asked at a picnic for three dull things, cheerfully says that will just suit her. Emma can't resist: 'you will be limited as to number, only three at once.'

In Emma, which gift arrives anonymously for Jane Fairfax and sets the whole village guessing?

A piano. Emma decides it is a love token from a married admirer and shares her theory with Frank Churchill, never suspecting that he sent it himself.

Which army officer, a friend of her late father, gave Jane Fairfax her excellent education?

Colonel Campbell brought Jane up with his own daughter from the age of nine. His modest fortune had to go to that daughter, so a fine education was the only provision he could make for Jane.

At which scenic spot does Emma thoughtlessly mock a garrulous spinster?

Box Hill. As the party waits to leave, her oldest friend tells her plainly how cruel the joke was, and a shamed Emma calls on her victim the very next morning to make amends.

In Emma, Frank Churchill rescues a terrified Harriet from a roadside encounter with whom?

Gypsies, in the novel's word: a begging child, then a noisy group, crowd round her on a quiet road. The rescue convinces Emma, wrong again, that Harriet and Frank are meant for each other.

Harriet Smith is finally revealed to be the natural daughter of whom?

A tradesman, comfortably off but no gentleman. So much for the gentle birth Emma had invented for her friend when talking her out of marrying a mere farmer.

What is the name of Emma's elder sister, who is married to the hero's younger brother John?

Isabella is her father's daughter: she frets over everyone's health just as he does, and the two debate whose doctor gives the better advice.

Where is Harriet Smith living when Emma befriends her?

A school: she is a parlour boarder at Mrs Goddard's. Emma takes her up at once, resolving to improve her and to detach her from the farming family she has been spending her time with.

On which festive night does the vicar propose to Emma Woodhouse?

Christmas Eve. Snow breaks up a dinner party, the guests scramble for home, and Emma finds herself shut in a carriage alone with him for the ride.

Which dish is the only one Emma's father, Mr Woodhouse, can wholeheartedly recommend to his supper guests?

Thin gruel. A nervous host, he loves to see the supper table laid but would rather nobody ate from it, and gently steers his guests away from anything richer than his own small basin.

At the midsummer garden party in Emma, the vicar's wife takes charge of gathering which fruit?

Strawberries. She starts out declaring them the best fruit in England and ends, after half an hour of stooping in the sun, tired to death and in need of a seat in the shade.

In Emma, what does Jane Fairfax insist on fetching herself each morning, even walking out in the rain for it?

Her letters. She is guarding a secret correspondence with Frank Churchill, so when the vicar's wife offers to send a servant to collect her post, she firmly refuses.

Which famous novelist reviewed Emma anonymously in the Quarterly Review in 1816?

Sir Walter Scott hailed the 'nameless author' for drawing ordinary life so truly. The review was no accident: Emma's publisher also ran the Quarterly, and asked him to write it.

According to her sternest critic, Emma has been drawing up admirable lists of what since she was twelve?

Books to read. The lists are well chosen and neatly arranged, he says, but she never gets through them: Emma 'will never submit to any thing requiring industry and patience'.

Emma was the last novel Jane Austen saw published; which of these appeared only after her death?

Persuasion came out at the end of 1817, months after she died. Only then did her brother Henry reveal her name to the public: every novel in her lifetime had appeared anonymously.

Whom does Emma marry at the end of the novel?

Mr Knightley wins her father's blessing by accident: a neighbour's poultry-house is robbed, and the nervous old man decides he would feel safer with a son-in-law in the house.

What public office does the hero of Emma hold in his own village?

Local magistrate, and the biggest landowner for miles, yet he lives so plainly that he keeps no carriage horses and often gets about on foot, to Emma's disapproval.

In Emma, after letting slip gossip he shouldn't know, Frank Churchill forms which word for Jane Fairfax in a spelling game?

Blunder. He follows it with 'Dixon', which makes Jane push the game away in anger, and a sharp-eyed onlooker begins to suspect that the two share a secret.

Which 1995 film relocates Emma to a Beverly Hills high school?

Clueless began as a pitch for a TV series about popular teenagers. Fox passed, fearing a show so centred on girls would not find an audience, and the idea came back as a film.

Who wrote and directed the 1995 Beverly Hills update of Emma?

Amy Heckerling remembered Emma from college and built her heroine on its sunny optimism, then sat in on classes at a real Beverly Hills school to catch how teenagers talked.

Which fictional school does Cher Horowitz attend in the 1995 update of Emma?

Bronson Alcott High School is invented, but its debate teacher borrowed his name from a real one, Herb Hall of Beverly Hills, who appears in the film as the school's principal.

Who played Emma in the 1996 Miramax film?

Gwyneth Paltrow, an American, won the part with a different accent altogether: the director said her flawless Texan in an earlier film convinced him she could play an English girl.

Which Trainspotting star played Frank Churchill in Miramax's 1996 Emma?

Ewan McGregor took the part to do something unlike Trainspotting and later called the choice a mistake: he was 'not very good in it', he said, and not helped by 'the world's worst wig'.

Rachel Portman's music for the 1996 Emma made her the first female composer to win a best-score prize at which awards?

The Oscars. No woman had won one for composing a score in nearly seventy years of ceremonies; then two did in a row, Portman in 1997 and Anne Dudley, for The Full Monty, a year later.

Which Australian actress, fresh from Muriel's Wedding, played Harriet Smith in the 1996 Miramax film of Emma?

Toni Collette had tried Austen when she was younger and could not get into her at all. Then she picked up Emma, found it 'so warm and witty and clever', and joked that maybe they had changed the book.

Who played Emma in the 1996 ITV television film?

Kate Beckinsale's Emma drew some 12 million viewers. A decade later ITV, trying to halt a slide in its ratings, brought it back as part of a whole season of Jane Austen dramas.

Who wrote the screenplay for ITV's 1996 television film of Emma?

Andrew Davies came to it straight from the BBC's Pride and Prejudice, where the moment everyone remembers, Mr Darcy's dip in the lake, was his own invention and is nowhere in Austen.

Who starred as Emma in the BBC's 2009 four-part serial?

Romola Garai's village was a real one in disguise: the BBC took over Chilham and spread gravel over the roads to hide their modern markings.

In the 2020 film of Emma, what sudden mishap interrupts the hero's proposal?

A nosebleed. Torn between the man she loves and the friend she believes loves him too, Emma is so overwrought that her nose starts to bleed before she can give him an answer.

Who played the heroine in the 2020 film of Emma?

Anya Taylor-Joy came to Austen from horror: she had made her name in The Witch and Split before a first-time director cast her as the meddling heiress.

Which punctuation mark did first-time director Autumn de Wilde add to the title of her 2020 film of Emma?

A full stop. 'There's a period at the end of Emma because it's a period film,' explained de Wilde, a photographer and music-video director making her first feature.

Which New Zealand winner of the Booker Prize wrote the screenplay for the 2020 film of Emma?

Eleanor Catton admitted she had never read Emma when she was asked to adapt it: she knew the story only from the screen, as a fan of the 1995 Beverly Hills update.

The 2020 film of Emma earned two Oscar nominations: Best Costume Design and which other?

Makeup and Hairstyling. The film went home empty-handed all the same: both of its nominations lost on the night to the same rival, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.

The 2010 film Aisha transplants the story of Emma to which country?

India. Set in Delhi's upper-class society, the film was later disowned by its own director, who said she had 'no control over the final cut' and that Jane Austen wouldn't recognise it as her Emma.

Emma Approved, the 2013 series that recast Emma Woodhouse as a lifestyle coach, was made for which platform?

YouTube. Each episode was a few minutes of Emma talking to her own camera, a video-diary format its makers had first tried on The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which won an Emmy.

Which author wrote Emma: A Modern Retelling (2014) for HarperCollins' Austen Project?

Alexander McCall Smith moved the story to the present day, swapping carriages for Mini Coopers and making Emma a university graduate who sets up as an interior designer.

Which fruit does Emma's neighbour send Jane Fairfax's household so freely that, his steward admits, he has none left?

Apples. He says nothing of the sacrifice, but his housekeeper is cross that her master 'should not be able to have another apple-tart this spring'.

Critics call Emma a pioneer of which technique, where third-person narration slips into the heroine's own thoughts?

Free indirect style lets the narration share Emma's delusions without flagging them, which is why the critic John Mullan called the novel revolutionary in its technique.

Frank Churchill dents Emma's good opinion by dashing sixteen miles to London, supposedly just for what?

A haircut. Emma finds 'an air of foppery and nonsense' in the trip, and her neighbour mutters that Frank is 'just the trifling, silly fellow I took him for'.

Emma's sister swears by her London doctor, Mr Wingfield, just as their father trusts which village apothecary?

Mr Perry. Mr Woodhouse gets him to agree that wedding cake disagrees with most people, yet rumour has all the little Perrys seen with a slice of it in their hands.