EMMA WOODHOUSE AND THE CHARMS OF IMAGINATION

How people perceive, how they know each other and themselves, is the subject of Jane Austen's fiction. We all live in our minds, yet we must see into others to understand them. Emma Woodhouse, the only one of Jane Austen's creations who is herself a creator, begins by rejecting tenderness of heart as a soft dependency and discovers that it can be a sympathetic power. For perception is an imaginative act, presupposing one's own limits and the separateness of others. Jane Fairfax, the friend Emma's desire to be first deprived her of, properly exists outside this narrative point of view. She is consistently made an object of our interest, yet kept inaccessible. Emma's overreaching had its source in the valid creative demand that life be interesting. Jane, as the heroine who remains unknown, is a pledge that when Emma moves out from her own constructions she will find the world worthy of the demands of her imagination. (SJM)