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object to blind all about him; and no one, I am sure, could be more effectually blinded than myself—except that I was not blinded—that it was my good fortune—that, in short, I was somehow or other safe from him” (p. 387).
    She was, and then again she wasn’t. Emma, who regards herself as sharp-eyed and penetrating, has been both used and blinded (or deceived) by Frank. Love is blind, so it is said. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s comedies that Jane Austen seems to have had in mind when she was writing, in Emma, about multiple deceptions, mismatches, and gross errors of perception. “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind” (act 1, scene 1). And Cupid figures as one of the possible answers to the riddle that begins, “Kitty, a fair but frozen maid.” Cupid turns out not to be the correct answer, but the riddle itself is laden with references to love—that is, to sex—and its likely injurious consequences for health. viii When Elton is about to return to Highbury, bringing his bride with him, Emma observes that Harriet is still repining over her loss. In order, as she believes, to jolt Harriet out of her fruitless moping, Emma cleverly and not very scrupulously or subtly accuses her of ingratitude. Harriet is duly shocked and falls all over herself in hyperbolic protestations to Emma of love, thankfulness, and subservience. Emma’s self-conceit is touched, and as Harriet leaves, she silently reflects that “she had never loved Harriet so well, nor valued her affection so highly before.” She then gives herself a “serious” talking-to.
    There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.... There is nothing to be compared to it. Warmth and tenderness of heart, with an affectionate, open manner, will beat all the clearness of head in the world, for attraction: I am sure it will. It is tenderness of heart which makes my dear father so generally beloved—which gives Isabella all her popularity.— I have it not; but I know how to prize and respect it. Harriet is my superior in all the charm and all the felicity it gives.... happy the man who changes Emma for Harriet (p. 241).
    This splendid passage characteristically welds together Emma’s acute, if momentary, sense of personal shortcoming with her contrived, sustained self-bamboozlement. It is not an either/or proposition, as if one might conceivably make an exchange of one for the other—it never is. Emma’s supposed “clearness of head” also includes her cloudy pipe dreams of glorious triangularities; “for attraction” begins a detour that takes her away from her temporary, dispassionate self-analysis; and Isabella’s popularity is, as far as the text bears evidence, an assertion concocted out of pure wind. Nevertheless, she has touched on a sensitive if not excessively painful spot. Warmth and tenderness of heart are what she recognizes as being missing or undeveloped parts of her being. In other words, there is something inadequate or defective in her affections—her emotions or affects, as we would rather portentously say today. If for her Jane Fairfax embodies “coldness,” then Emma, even in her own estimation, is definitely cool. In other words, she may have to change, perhaps even to grow up. How such a development is to be brought about is a consideration that we will defer for the present.

II
    If we examine Jane Austen’s detailed representation of the society in which she sets Emma, one of the things that is likely to strike us as readers almost two hundred years later is that for all its traditional rural inertia, the local social world of this narrative and the larger world that is its context are in the course of going through complex, uneven, and even contradictory processes of change. The era of European-wide wars brought on by the epoch-making French Revolution, and its Napoleonic succession is coming to a final end. In Britain the sense of national