Why, she was a little old maid ’oo’d written ’alf a dozen books about a hundred years ago. ’Twasn’t as if there was anythin’ to them, either. I know. I had to read ’em. They weren’t adventurous, nor smutty, nor what you’d call even interestin’—all about girls o’ seventeen . . . , not certain ’oom they’d like to marry; an’ their dances an’ card-parties an’ picnics, and their young blokes goin’ off to London on ’orseback for ’air-cuts an’ shaves. [Which is exactly what Frank Churchill does in Emma.]
Yet once Humberstall was accepted into the brotherhood—“it’s a very select Society, an’ you’ve got to be a Janeite in your ’eart”—he came to understand her true worth. “I read all her six books now for pleasure ’tween times in the shop. . . . You take it from me, Brethren, there’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place. Gawd bless ’er, whoever she was.”
The very first review of Emma was written by none other than Sir Walter Scott himself. If people had trouble recognizing the value of the novel’s portrait of daily life, he said, if they thought of it as a book in which “nothing happened,” that’s because they were so used to reading novels in which all too many things happened. Austen lived in the great age of trash fiction: the gothic novel, the sentimental novel, the bodice ripper—crumbling castles, creaking doors, and secret passageways; heavenly maidens and dark seducers, piercing shrieks and floods of tears, wild rides and breathless escapes; shipwrecks, deathbeds, abductions, avowals; poverty, misery, rape, and incest. And of course, at the last minute, by grace of the author and a heap of coincidences, a happy ending.