Study Questions

1. When the story opens, how old is Emma?

2. Why isn’t she married?

3. What are the Woodhouses’ feelings on the day of Miss Taylor’s wedding?

4. Who did Miss Taylor marry?

5. What social position do the Woodhouses occupy in High¬bury?

6. Why doesn’t Mr. Woodhouse think they will ever see Miss Taylor again?

7. What is Mr. Knightley’s connection to the Woodhouses?

8. How does Mr. Knightley think the Woodhouses regard Miss Taylor’s marriage?

9. Why does Mr. Knightley question Emma’s claims that she made the match herself?

10. What does he think of her plans to match Mr. Elton with a wife?

Answers

1. At twenty-one, Emma is of marriageable age and has excellent prospects because she is “handsome, clever, and rich with a comfortable home and happy disposition.”

2. Emma’s mother died when she was five, and her sister has married and moved to London, leaving her the mistress of Hartfield. She has made a promise to her father that she will not marry.

3. Emma misses Miss Taylor. She took her mother’s place and raised her, schooled her, and for the last seven years, had been a dear companion and friend. Mr. Woodhouse doesn’t like change of any sort, and matrimony, the “origin of change, was always disagreeable.”

4. Mr. Weston, a widower of “suitable age and pleasant manner” whom many thought would never marry again. Emma takes great satisfaction in believing she made the match.

5. Their estate of Hartfield is the centerpiece of the village of Highbury where the Woodhouses “were first in consequence. All looked up to them.”

6. Though she has moved half a mile down the road, Mr. Woodhouse says it’s too far to walk. When Emma reminds him they can take a carriage, he says it’s too short a distance to bother with the horses.

7. Not only is he an old and intimate friend and of landed gentry, but his younger brother, John, is married to Emma’s older sister, Isabella.

8. He assumes they both feel joy since Mr. Weston is a “straight-forward, open-hearted man,” and Miss Taylor earns the advantage of having to take care of one person instead of two.

9. Mr. Knightley accuses Emma of having made a lucky guess rather than actually working at getting the two married.

10. Mr. Knightley laughingly agrees with Emma’s father that he be invited to dinner, but without the matchmaking because “a man of six or seven-and-twenty can take care of himself.”