Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park operate in opposing aesthetic genres: the first as romantic comedy, the second as anti-romance, or moral tale. What further artistic challenges is Jane Austen setting herself in her next (and last) two novels, Emma and Persuasion? Very different in technique and form – the mature novelist never repeated herself – both novels remain concerned with young women finding their proper place and role in the world of early nineteenth-century England. But there are significant differences in the imagined ‘England’ they evoke, and in the way the two heroines view their world and act in it. Though each novel ends with the heroine’s marriage, their narrative structures are so different as to have the reader searching for new generic descriptors.

Emma

At least two artistic challenges inform Emma. First, it anticipates the detective story in being a novel designed to be reread, with the reader each time discovering more complexities to the hidden story. Second, Austen declared that in this novel she was going to ‘take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like’. No longer lovable, sparkling Elizabeth or ‘my Fanny’, the steadfast heroine; instead, a spoilt, interfering and often deluded young woman, whose energy, good heart and desire to lead need to find their proper outlet. The novelist clearly indicates her position as ironical narrator of this young woman’s story in the opening paragraph: