Emma’s paradise

Like Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse’s desires for her man are awakened while exploring his property, Donwell Abbey with “all its appendages of prosperity and beauty, its rich pastures, spreading flocks, orchard in blossom, and light column of smoke ascending.”

That this scene presents itself in Midsummer has been cause for critical concern: Blossoms in mid-summer? And why are they still warning the house with a fire?

John Wiltshire suggests that this is no simple mistake: “What is being presented here is not a place but an idyll, the fantasy of the pastoral paradise. There is an enthusiasm that seeks to represent Donwell and its estate, not just as admirable and august, but as having everything – strawberries at their peak of ripeness, sunshine, ‘spreading flocks,’ ‘ample gardens washed by a stream,’ prosperous farmland, and the domestic hearth: a rich constation of all that desire encompasses.”

And, of course, her knighly Adam in his garden.