Emma Woodhouse

Romola Garai, Emma, BBC, 2009

Though it may seem that Emma Woodhouse has no mountains to get over, this is not entirely true. Emma is most hampered by her own willfulness which, as we learn, blinds her to the results of her actions. The story of her 21st year, as told by Jane Austen in the novel which bears her name published in 1815, brings Emma from her youthful sense of power to shame and humiliation, while opening her closed world to love and a stronger sense of other people’s realities.

Emma lives alone with her father in one of the better houses in Highbury, a village in Surrey. She has seen little of the world due to her father’s fearful temperament and his reluctance to leave home. Emma has just lost her best companion, her governess, who is really more of a friend. Neither her father nor her governess have tried to curb Emma’s spirit, though she is very well educated to filial duty and gentle-womanly manners.

Believing that her own efforts have helped her governess find a husband, Emma decides that the village curate must be in need of a wife. She befriends Harriet, only 17, hoping to educate the beautiful girl into the gentry. Harriet has become the beloved of a yoeman farmer, but under Emma’s influence, Harriet rejects him. Emma is certain that Harriet would make Mr. Eliot, the curate, a good wife. Emma’s good friend Mr. Knightley tries to warn her not to interfere in Harriet’s life, but Emma brushes off his advice.

The biddable Harriet falls in love with Mr. Eliot. Emma emphasizes to her all the ways he seems to care for Harriet, but is then horrified to find that Mr. Eliot’s attentions are actually directed towards herself. When she finds herself alone in a carriage with him after Christmas dinner, Emma rejects his advances. Mr. Eliot leaves town in a huff.

The gentry in Highbury seem to have little to do but visit and talk about each other, sharing letters and news. Jane Fairfax visits her old aunt, and Frank Churchill, who was adopted out of the village and into a wealthy family, also returns. Frank is lively and many think he might become attached to Emma. They plan dances together. Emma thinks Jane more accomplished than herself and does not befriend her.

With Frank away, Emma examines her feelings and finds she is not in love with him. She has quarreled with Mr. Knightley about him also. Mr. Knightley does not think Frank a good man. Emma is surprised to find that Harriet has fallen in love with Mr. Knightley for his kindness to her. Emma has compounded the unhappiness, encouraging her because she believed Harriet referred to Frank. The tangle of feelings in Highbury is finally unraveled to reveal that Frank and Jane Fairfax have been secretly engaged. Frank has been covering this up by toying with Emma. This duplicity is felt to be an outrage in the village.

Emma is fearful that Mr. Knightley might prefer Harriet to herself, realizing that she has been foolish. “The only source whence anything like consolation or composure could be drawn, was in the resolution of her own better conduct, and the hope that, however inferior in spirit and gaiety might be the following and every future winter of her life to the past, it would yet find her more rational, more acquainted with herself, and leave her less to regret when it were gone.”

When Mr. Knightley learns that Emma never loved Frank despite their flirtations in company, he reveals that Emma, with all her faults, is his dearest; that he has loved her since she was 13. Emma is transported, her happiness only marred by knowing Harriet’s feelings. She sends Harriet to her sister in London. There Harriet meets with her farmer, who proposes again. Harriet accepts and is married in September.

Emma’s father hates change and always rails against marriage. Emma thinks she cannot leave home while he is still alive. Considering this, Mr. Knightley suggests that he move in with Emma and her father, which is finally agreed to. Emma marries Mr. Knightley in October.

Jane Austen is careful to elaborate the feelings of her characters in delightfully specific language. She wraps up the stories of each of the important characters. Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax are suitably remorseful and their apologies are accepted.

Austen’s clear delineation of values makes her stories useful to us more than two hundred years after she wrote. A progressive, she mocks Emma’s pretensions and, through Mr. Knightley, shows that a person’s character is more important than his class. Lack of real feeling, money-seeking and egotism show up as false in characters that have as much life as those we admire. In fact it is quite astonishing how much Austen endears Emma to us, even though we know she is usually wrong! Emma’s sincere shame and growing self-knowledge contribute and we do not begrudge a happy resolution to her story. If you fall in love with Emma, I do not think there has been a better representation of her than Romola Garai’s in the 2009 BBC production of the novel, clips of which can be found on Youtube.

Leila Hosnani

Egyptian Coptic Woman

Leila Hosnani’s story is told in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandrian Quartet (published 1957-1960). We meet her through the eyes of the young diplomat Mountolive, who is visiting the beautiful farm Karm Abu Girg outside of Alexandria where Leila lives with her ailing husband and two grown sons. They are Christian Copts, very proud, who have been the “brains” of Egypt, doing much of the administrative work of the country.

Leila had been a brilliant student, had hoped to become a doctor. But for an Egyptian woman born between the two world wars, this not possible. Leila is obedient, pliant, and loyal. She marries into a family which her parents arrange for her. Her life must belong to Egypt. “Whether she was happy or unhappy she herself had never thought to consider. She was hungry, that was all, hungry for the world of books and meetings which lay forever outside this old house and the heavy charges of the land.”

Thus Leila becomes that age-old archetype of woman, a woman of experience who accepts that her work and natural gifts might not be appreciated in the great world of politics, culture, academia or even art; but knows that this world cannot get on without her; knows what a woman is to men and that her life lies in the areas of graciousness, civility, intimacy and beauty. Such a woman crafts a place for herself at the heart of her household that only she can fill: rooted in family, with children, representing that family to the world with grace, ensuring civility, showing to younger people that it is okay; that life, that being a woman is worth the pain. 

Leila settles into the “rambling old-fashioned house built upon a network of lakes and embankments near Alexandria.” She subscribes to books and periodicals in the four languages she knows besides her native Arabic, and goes into the city of Alexandria for the occasional holiday. But she does not appreciate shallow society and becomes introspective.

Leila begins to live through her smooth and attractive son Nessim, who runs the family banking and shipping businesses. Her other son Narouz runs the farm as her much-older husband suffers from increasing muscular atrophy. Mountolive, a young British foreign service officer, is invited to stay on the farm for a summer to improve his Arabic. He and Leila ride out into the desert together at her husband’s suggestion. They have an affair. “Only I must not fall in love,” Leila tells Mountolive.

When Mountolive is posted to other countries, Leila begins a correspondence with him. With their difference in ages, she had not expected their affair to last, but distance frees them. “She kept pace with his growth in those long, well-written, ardent letters which betrayed only the hunger which is as poignant as anything the flesh is called upon to cure: the hunger for friendship, the fear of being forgotten.”

When Leila’s husband dies, she considers meeting Mountolive in Europe, but that summer she contracts smallpox, which “melted down the remains of her once celebrated beauty.” Leila buys heavy black veils and retires to a life in the summerhouse on the farm where she reads and writes with a tame snake for company. She tells Mountolive not to pity her and begs him to write as gaily as before.

In the third book of his quartet, entitled Mountolive, Durrell reveals the plot at the bottom of all of them, which Nessim has conceived for the sake of the Copts, together with the Armenians, Jews and Greeks in Egypt, as a defense against being engulfed by the Arab tide. He believes that the British have turned the Moslems against them and he has been aiding the Jews in their fight against the British in Palestine, providing arms. This is the basis for his marriage to Justine. He has many covers for this plot. Leila is finally told of it.

In the resolution of this complex tale, Mountolive comes back to Egypt as British ambassador. Leila, who has resisted seeing him, finally meets Mountolive to beg for Nessim’s life, as she is convinced that he has been found out and will suffer. This is humiliating for both of them. The British do prevail upon the Egyptian police, but Nessim has successfully bribed them. Nessim sends Leila to a family farm in Kenya, but Narouz will not leave. The Egyptian police come for him and assassinate him instead of Nessim.

We do not learn more of Leila, though the fortunes of the Hosnani family suffer and we must assume she shares in this. I have always been fascinated by the resignation and the dignity with which Leila conducts herself after her disfiguring illness. And in re-reading this book I finally came to see Durrell’s value. It is not just the lush language for which he is justly celebrated. Or the varieties of love which he describes, including all the cynicism which resulted from the wars when European nations were thrown into chaos with ramifications all over the world. It is also that he can flesh out the meaning and motives of characters with whom he is not naturally in sympathy. The Hosnani family is richly drawn.

Tove Jansson

Tove Jansson overcame the darkness of an early life to become a bright and shining light. She was born in 1914 to a family of artists in Helsinki, Finland. Her father was a sculptor in the classical tradition. Her mother illustrated magazines and accepted commissions for graphic designs, prompting Tove’s own early drawings. In the summers, the family left their crowded city apartment and went out to an island in the Finnish archipelago. It was difficult to get to, but they all loved the sea.

War darkened the close family life, however. Finland fought a civil war in 1918, affecting their father’s personality. The country was squeezed between Soviet Russia on one side and the growing Nazi presence on the other. Initially the Finns cooperated with the Nazis against a Soviet invasion, but then the bombing began. Tove’s younger brother served in the army during World War II. Tove’s letters reflect how dispiriting this time period was.

Tove went to art school, but abandoned it for work with tutor Sam Vanni. She regarded her painting as most important, but she also created a family she called the Moomintrolls, writing their stories and drawing them to sublimate her own feelings. The Moomintroll family had the personalities of Tove’s own family with added characters reflecting events in Tove’s life. Catastrophes happen in the books, but the family comes through, with tolerance for each other’s quirks.

In 1944 the Nazis were driven out, leaving a trail of destruction. Finland retained its independence, but lost some of its territory to the Soviets. After the war came a time of self-discovery for Tove. At 30, she was clear that she did not want a conventional family life, with children who might have to go to war. Art was the most important thing. Due to conflicts with her father, she found her own studio in the middle of Helsinki. She and her friends danced, talked and stayed up all night. Tove fell in love with Viveke Bandler, but the affair was secret and brief. Viveke was married and same-sex relationships were illegal in Finland at the time.

Tove published several children’s books about the Moomintroll family, leading to a request from a British publisher for a cartoon strip series about them. Beginning in 1954, a huge advertising campaign launched the strip which brought Tove money and fame. For seven years she produced six strips a week before becoming exhausted and handing the strip off to her younger brother Lars.

About this time, when Tove feared she was too busy to do fine art, she met and fell in love with the artist Tuulikki Pietila. Tuulikki had a studio near Tove’s. They could work separately and cross to each other’s place through a passage in the attic of the buildings. Longing for a simpler life, Tove and Tuulikki built a house on an island far out in the Finnish archipelago, Klovharu. Without plumbing or electricity, the house had windows on all four sides so they could watch storms roll in from any direction and boats approaching.

Tove began to write adult fiction, including The Summer Book, written in 1971, just after her mother’s death. The book shares the perceptions of a six-year-old and her grandmother who are spending a summer on an island. They are shaken by very specific natural events, and so is the reader.

Tove and Tuulikki took a trip around the world in 1971, collecting jazz records and spending time in New Orleans. Every summer they lived on their remote island until 1992 when their boat broke up in a storm. Tove had cancer in her last years and died in 2001.

I first met Tove Jansson through the wonderful Summer Book. I also read a profusely illustrated biography of her, Tove Jansson: Work and Love, by Tuula Karjalainen [2014]. Truly a creative sprite who always took time for delight and love, you can watch an hour-long BBC documentary on Tove here.