62 JANE AUSTEN 



In comparison with the hurried unsheltered life 

 of the modern girl, Emma seems a princess shut in 

 a tower of brass or an enchanted garden. And 

 although in the course of the story she escapes this 

 particular tower, it is only to fall into the castle of 

 Mr. Knightly, who (with his squire William Larkins) 

 plays the part of knight errant. 



And Emma was not dull, but full of happy 

 animation, and her quiet life encouraged the 

 growth of an educated, or at least a cultivated, 

 condition which re-appears, in the other novels. 

 This placid life is all the more striking in contrast 

 to the great contemporary struggle of the Napole- 

 onic wars, hardly a sound of which reaches Miss 

 Austen's readers, although in Persuasion we do 

 hear something of Captain Wentworth's prize 

 money. George Eliot knew the flavour of this 

 quietude, and reproduces it in the introduction to 

 Felix Holt. But even in these pre-reform days the 

 quiet is beginning to be broken ; the stage-coach- 

 man is beginning to dread the railway train, and 

 looks on Mr. Huskisson's death as a proof of God's 

 anger against Stephenson. Again, in Middlemarch 

 we see the country stirring in its sleep, and poor 

 Dorothea suffering in the process of awakening. 

 There is nothing of this in Miss Austen ; it is true 

 that the Miss Bennets sometimes experienced the 

 blankness of female existence, but they could 

 imagine nothing blanker than the departure of the 

 militia from Meryton. 



Jane Austen's books have something of the 

 quiet atmosphere of Cowper's Letters. Mr. Austen 

 Leigh in his Memoir speaks of her love for the 



