Free Emma (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by Jane Austen Page A

freely. xvii He likes to mingle and also to go off spontaneously in unexpected directions. As the chief landowner and personage in the neighborhood, he chooses to be present and on the scene. He is direct, practical, prudent, and down to earth. The second reason is that he has “little spare money.” This detail, one supposes, is there to suggest to us the uneven, uncertain, and rapidly fluctuating character of the state of both national and regional economies: Some are rising and some are falling. Knightley is trying with success to hold his own at Donwell. He even feels constrained to keep no horses, not even for his carriage, if Mrs. Weston, when she says, “ ‘he would not have had a pair of horses for himself,’ ” agrees with Emma and means that he rented, borrowed, or otherwise procured two horses for the specific occasion. We know that the Crown Inn keeps “a couple of pair of post-horses” to be used “for the convenience of the neighbourhood.” There may be horses to rent at the other, lesser inns of the village; there may even be a village stables, but we are not told. What we do know is that people do get around, even the super-sedentary Mr. Woodhouse. He owns a carriage and horses, and we even know the name of his trusty coachman. John Knightley also has a carriage for his family, into which he invites Elton on their way to dinner and Mr. Weston’s good wine. The Westons have a carriage too. Mr. Weston also rides on horseback to London and back in one fatiguing day. Mr. Elton rides his horse to London to get Harriet’s portrait framed, and after his marriage he also commands a “new” carriage. Mr. Perry performs his medical rounds with the help of a horse; and his unrealized plan of “setting up his carriage,” conveyed as news in the letter secretly sent Frank, almost causes that worthy to blow the cover on his engagement to Jane (p. 313ff). Frank in his turn hires a chaise to get to London for a haircut and surreptitiously to buy a Broadwood for Jane; otherwise he travels back and forth between Richmond and Highbury or Donwell on horseback. Emma fancies seeing “Mr. Cole’s carriage horses returning from exercise” as she stands idly in the doorway at Ford’s—newly gained affluence requires a show. Only the women and Knightley and the anonymous Nobodies and the gypsies, who are called “trampers,” go on foot; and even the gypsies have horses to pull their caravans. Or so it seems, until Miss Bates, “passing near the window” of one of her two rooms, “descried Mr. Knightley on horseback not far off” (p. 219). After that, Knightley appears either on horseback or without specification of his means of transportation. But when they all go to Box Hill for an outdoor party, the narrator inclusively notes “the gentlemen on horseback” (p. 349). Unless they were all leasing from Avis, there seems to be something to explain.
    What is this apparent rigmarole all about? In the first place we can remark that those commentators who have criticized Jane Austen for omitting the details of daily, material, and historical life have not read her novels with sufficient care. Those works are, on the contrary, dense with such notations. The exceptional economy and steady flow of her prose make it very easy to overlook what she is actually doing. Knightley is the leading gentleman and chief agricultural man of business in this miniature society. Why make such a point of depriving him of his own horses and ready cash and then apparently contradict it? For when we finally get to Donwell Abbey, we find no signs of economic distress or strain.
    ... its ample gardens stretching down to meadows washed by a stream, of which the Abbey, with all the old neglect of prospect, had scarcely a sight,—and its abundance of timber in rows and avenues, which neither fashion nor extravagance had rooted up. The house was larger than Hartfield, and totally unlike it, covering a good deal of ground, rambling and