Emma - Volume two

by Jane Austen

It starts with a picnic and a cruelty.

Emma, attempting wit, wounds a woman she considers beneath her notice. The moment hangs in the air. Mr. Knightley's rebuke is sharp. Emma feels the sting but deflects it, turning her attention to newer distractions.

Frank Churchill deepens his flirtation. Emma interprets every word as courtship. She builds castles in the air and moves into them. She ignores the warnings in Knightley's voice, in Jane Fairfax's cool distance, in her own occasional unease. Harriet, meanwhile, has transferred her affections upward. She now believes herself in love with Knightley. Emma encourages this. She sees no danger. She sees no pattern. She sees nothing clearly at all.

The volume tightens around her. A secret engagement hovers in the background, invisible to Emma's gaze. A piano arrives from an unknown sender. A party at the Crown Inn exposes fractures in Highbury's social fabric. Then comes Box Hill.

The picnic should be triumph. Instead, it becomes Emma's lowest moment her vanity and thoughtlessness laid bare before the very people she sought to impress. Knightley speaks words she cannot forget. She returns home in silence, finally understanding that her blindness has hurt someone who mattered. But understanding comes slowly. And the full cost of her errors has not yet arrived.

Published
Dec. 1, 1815
Genre
Classic Fiction Romance
SubGenre
Women Fiction
Series
Emma
Language
en-gb
Total Chapter
18
Total pages
67