“Many little particulars”; “I am impatient for a thousand particulars”; “She will give you all the minute particulars.” Not just particulars, but “little” particulars, “minute” particulars. Life is lived at the level of the little. In fact, I now saw, it was remarkable just how many things in the novel were “little.” “Little particulars.” “Little affairs, arrangements, perplexities, and pleasures.” Harriet Smith was “little,” always. Her friends the Martins had “a little Welch cow, a very pretty little Welch cow,” and a little gazebo in the garden, just big enough to hold a dozen people. The story took place entirely within the vicinity of Highbury, and space itself seemed contracted by the smallness of the frame. The distance between Emma’s house and Mrs. Weston’s was only half a mile, yet it was made to seem like an arduous journey. Though Emma was over four hundred pages long, its whole scale was little, like a crowded scene inscribed upon a miniature.

If I was having trouble seeing the importance of the world that Austen was putting in front of me, in other words, it wasn’t entirely my fault. Like all the great teachers, I now saw, she made us come to her. She had momentous truths to tell, but she concealed them in humble packages. Her “littleness” was really an optical illusion, a test. Jesus spoke in parables so his disciples would have to make an effort to understand him. The truth, he knew, cannot be grasped in any other way. Austen reminded me, I realized, of something that Plato said about his great mentor Socrates, who also taught by telling stories. “His words are ridiculous when you first hear them, for his talk is of pack-asses and smiths and cobblers . . . so that any ignorant or inexperienced person might feel disposed to laugh at him; but he who sees what is within will find that they are the only words which have a meaning in them, and likewise the most divine.”