Jane Austen's Emma

Most people like Pride and Prejudice, and I get that. It's a great story and a great romance. But Emma has always had a special place in my heart.

This is how Jane Austen starts her book, Emma.

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

With this opening, we can see that this is not going to be a typical heroine or typical love story. Usually, protagonists want something. They want affirmation, or security, or to just be taken out of their current situation. Emma wants nothing--in both senses of the verb.

Well, Emma does need something. She just doesn't know what it is yet. And as readers we don't really know yet either, because Austen has already gone through our mental checklist of "Things Heroines Usually Have to Get." We'll see what Emma has to get later.

So we're about to read a love story about someone who apparently has no problems. Unlike an Elizabeth Bennet, she has no financial or social drive to get married.And neither does she have an emotional reason, because she already receives love and affection from her family. She even has children to love her, with her nieces and nephews. And given social norms, she could probably have a niece live with her for extended periods of time. All the fun of motherhood, and no risk of childbirth--which is pretty dangerous in those days.

This story is about love for the sake of love and marriage for the sake of marriage. Emma doesn't need any of the incidental things people try to get by entering a marriage. In this book, marriage isn't a fairy tale ending or a solution to life's problems. From Emma and Knightly's relationship, you can see that a good marriage means having someone understand you, help you, contrast you in some areas, see your faults and tell you of them, but love you completely anyway.

Finding someone like that is a million times more exciting than having a rich, sophisticated guy ride up on a white horse and save you from gypsy bandits.

Emma starts the book thinking that she has no story, because she's already got it made--she's rich, she's beloved, she's clever, she's secure. But like Neil Gaiman's Sandman, she has to stop making stories for other people and come to see herself as someone still in the middle of her own journey. Still making a lot of wrong choices and still learning a lot.

By the end of the book, Emma has learned a little bit about love and a little bit about how not to be a douchebag. Which is probably one of the hardest lessons anyone has to learn. "Why You Shouldn't Be a Douchebag Even if You Can Get Away With It" is an immensely difficult concept. One thing Emma learns is that people get hurt. Nice people get hurt. And unless you're the best one-upper around, you get hurt.

With Emma, you've got a book that shows you the nature of love in itself and why justice should be valued for itself. Essentially, it's the same questions Plato asked in his Symposium and his Republic.

But it's a lot funnier and it's got love triangles. Go read Emma!