Read Charles and Emma for Free Online Page B

passion. Emma didn’t like sentimentality.
    When they were little, Emma was sure that Fanny was a better person than she. Fanny was inherently Good. Emma brooded over her own flaws, in contrast to what she considered Fanny’s moral superiority. One time an older cousin brought three brooches for Fanny, Emma, and another young cousin. Fanny had first choice, and Emma watched as she chose the least pretty pin. Emma’s turn came next, and rather than leave the prettiest pin for her cousin, as her older sister had done, she took it for herself. She felt badly about this and regretted it her whole life.
    But Fanny adored Emma, too. After taking care of the Dovelies for a while, one of their great-aunts wrote to their mother:
    Â 
    I marvel at the strength of the girls’ spirits as much as I do at the perfection of their tempers. I feel now very sure that not only not a cross word ever passes between them, but that an irritable feeling never arises. Fanny, to be sure, is calmness itself, but the vivacity of Emma’s feelings, without perfectly knowing her, would make me expect that Fanny’s reproofs, which she often gives with an elder sister air, would ruffle her a little; but I have never seen thatexpressive face take the shadow of an angry look, and I do think her love for Fanny is the prettiest thing I ever saw.
    Â 
    The aunt went on to say that Emma’s character was shaped by her closeness to Fanny.
    Â 
    I ascribe much of Emma’s joyous nature to have been secured, if not caused, by Fanny’s yielding disposition; had the other met with a cross or an opposing sister there was every chance that with her ardent feelings, her temper had become irritable. Now she is made the happiest being that ever was looked on, and so much affection in her nature as will secure her from selfishness.
    Â 
    Fanny was not only generous, she was also more religious than Emma. Although both girls taught in the little village Sunday school, Fanny took it more seriously, as she did her confirmation at sixteen. Emma was more interested in parties and plays. Right after her confirmation, Emma and her Darwin cousins celebrated with a party at Maer. They put on a play,
The Merry Wives of Windsor,
and had so much fun that Emma’s mother complained they kept her “in such a whirl of noise, and ins and outs, that I have not found any leisure.”
    The sisters enjoyed traveling, and when they were nineteen and twenty-one, they went to Geneva, Switzerland, and spent eight months with their favorite aunt, Jessie, and her eccentric Italian husband, J. C. de Sismondi. Aunt Jessie and Sismondi were deeply in love and had no children, so they showered their love and attention on the Dovelies. They introduced them into society and took them to fancy parties. After one ball, Emma wrote home to Elizabeth:
    Â 
    The whole Theatre was quite full and it looked very pretty. We were to dance with whoever asked us. The first man Idanced with was very disagreeable and vulgar, which put me rather in despair for the rest of the ball; however the rest of my partners were very tidy, so I liked it very well. I had the good luck to dance with one or two Englishmen…When I was afraid any particularly horrid-looking man was going to ask me to dance I began such a very earnest conversation with Fanny that they could not interrupt me…
    Â 
    When it was time for the girls to leave Geneva, their father arrived to escort them home, bringing along Caroline Darwin for company. Afterward, Caroline wrote them a letter that she began “My dear Fanny and Emma,” and then she added in parentheses, “I know you like being classed together, and as Charlotte and Eliz. to this day speak of you both as if you were but
one,
I shall follow their example.” The sisters, different as could be,
were
as one, and happily so.
    All in all, what Jane Austen says about Emma Woodhouse in the opening paragraph of her novel
Emma
could