Reviews with content warning for Toxic friendship - Emma

Reviews tagging 'Toxic friendship'

Emma by Jane Austen

15 reviews

wooblatoober's review against another edition

challenging funny lighthearted slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

i’m surprised to say i really enjoyed this book, especially as i got to the end. it was an exceedingly difficult read for me since it was published in 1815 (not my reading forte), & i had many complaints at the beginning, but all of them were assuaged as the book went on. i was expecting it to be like little women, since that was austen’s only other work i had read before this, in ways i didn’t like—little women spelled out, from how i saw it, that the husband knows best and that’s that. i felt like in the marriage department, little women put too much fault on the women too often, and not enough fault on the men, when there were problems or disagreements. emma couldn’t be more different from little women in this aspect, likely, i think, because it’s fictional, so austen can make the men whatever she wants them to be, but she does a great job of making it still seem realistic, as much as i can tell as an american living in the 21st century, who doesn’t know the ins and outs and subtleties of the highly structured culture of england in 1815.

below is my spoiler-riddled feminist discussion about the book.

besides interactions with men in which emma is empowered, i really appreciate her relationship with jane—she doesn’t like her at first, a bit arbitrarily and a bit due to jealousy in ways, it seems—but they become friends at the end, & hot girls being friends instead of having a rivalry is just so sexy. & THEN, mr. knightley is dreamy lol! i suspected at the beginning that she would be wrong about everything, he would be right about everything, and they’d get married because he’s “good for her” or some shit. but i was pleasantly wrong. emma, who is much younger than mr. knightley (which i feel gives her much better reason to be wrong, rather than just being a woman lol), is wrong about a lot of things—BUT!!! mr. knightley is wrong about things, too. not only that, he seeks out harriet to get to know her and try to see emma’s side, & OPENLY ADMITS to emma that he was wrong about her. & there was something sweet to me about their convo about how emma treated miss bates—mr. knightley wasn’t mad, & didn’t think she meant to be mean. he just told her it hurt miss bates’s feelings—no unsolicited advice, just the facts he believed she would have wanted to know. not to mention mr. knightley MOVED IN WITH HER when they got married, despite being richer, having a better home, & being in a relatively higher place in society (i think), just so her dad wouldn’t be upset. even though they /did/ believe stress back then would make you die, i still believe it’s sweet, especially for the time period. i think any other man would at least just put off the wedding until mr. woodhouse died, at the least. more impatient men might even insist she moves in with him with her father, or even without mr. woodhouse.

i really liked emma. i feel like i could relate to her in a lot of ways, and i really enjoyed that. it was almost like the book was being written from my own point of view—i thought the same way as emma, like, the whole time lol. i didn’t even see a lot of twists coming that i think the reader was meant to see.

the classism bothered me, the belief that your blood firmly cements you into what kind of person you can be, and i understand that it would have been even more feminist for emma to never get married,

let alone to a man who was an adult when he fell in love with her when she was 13.

but i also want to acknowledge first that

she was an adult when he confessed to her and when they got married,

and again that this was written in 1815, and how much we don’t understand about the culture of england in that time period unless we’re scholars who study it. there are so many subtleties that go over our heads, that were outrageously feminist for the time. i can’t ask for a woman growing up in the late 1700s—not only growing up with those ideologies and understandings of society, but writing her books for other people living in the early 1800s who have those ideologies and understandings of society, and living with the consequences of what she publishes, or what she can even get published—to be completely politically correct for 2024. like she was wrong in those aspects—the classism, the

power relationship mr. knightley would have more realistically had over her,

the fact that she could have stayed single. it was 200 years ago. she was right in a lot of other ways, and that’s what i enjoyed.

not to mention austen purposely wrote it as a romance, so emma might as well fall in love with the one man who ever admits he’s wrong lmao.

i just wanted to add this to my review after seeing so many reviews that complained about those things. it’s still a book written 200 years ago, & that’s something to keep in mind so you can enjoy it in its context.

Content Warnings

moriahleigh's review against another edition

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lighthearted relaxing slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

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wickedgrumpy's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful lighthearted slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

This one dragged on a bit to really hammer the point home.

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bookedbymadeline's review against another edition

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lighthearted slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

So this was technically my 5th Austen (4th that I finished because I did DNF Mansfield Park). If I only count the 4 I finished so far, Emma is possibly last on my rankings list.

The novel is extremely slow at times, causing me to be bored and at one point I started skimming some of the dialogues.

There were too many monologues from characters (looking at you Miss Bates) or descriptions that went on unnecessarily (did not need those descriptions on Pork, Woodhouses)! I think the novel could have been cut by about 100 pages and nothing of substance would change. The pacing felt all over the place as the story picked up for me around 60 pages in but then slowed down again-rinse and repeat. The ending felt dragged out and kind of anticlimactic.

I didn’t mind the characters as much as others may have. Emma could be annoying and spoiled but I found her entertaining enough to read about. Miss Bates and Mrs Elton drove me insane, and Frank Churchill is a walking red flag. Mainly continued the book for Mr Knightley, that man carried this book! Mr Woodhouse had some funny (and relatable) lines, “the sooner any party breaks up, the better.” 😂

Overall I’m mostly glad to have read this and checked it off my list of Austen novels. But I can understand why many don’t like classics or Austen if they read Emma (I swear her other books are so much better and less boring). This is one Austen I won’t be rereading though.

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