Penguins on Parade: The Deluxe Emma!
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Some Penguin Classics prompt a sigh of relief, especially after the loosey-goosey anything-goes Week O’ Penguins we’ve had this time around (Ray Russell, I ask you!). After watching a coked-up gag-writer like Charles Beaumont pull down his own Penguin Classic (if that happened in a typical three-page Charles Beaumont story, he’d be super-honored until he discovered that … he could never read any OTHER book!)(*SIGH*), it’s like a draught of cool water to arrive at the end of our week and find ourselves reading a tried-and-true indomitable like Jane Austen’s Emma, which is one of the latest additions to the Deluxe line, just in time to celebrate the 200th anniversary of its original appearance in 1815.
Although … even now, in the apparently safe harbor of Emma, we come full-circle to the place where we started: mystery.
Not on some of the main points, mind you. This 200th anniversary Deluxe Annotated edition is introduced by Juliette Wells, whose book Everybody’s Jane: Austen in the Popular Imagination was a perfect combination of authoritative and accessible, and that’s a combination you definitely want in a pretty new paperback edition like this one, a paperback edition we can easily imagine being assigned in college classes. Wells gives us a wonderful Introduction to this wonderful book, the last one published in Austen’s lifetime and the first one whose business arrangements she wrangled herself rather than using her brother as a proxy. Wells allows herself comparatively few pages in which to orient the reader, and as in Everybody’s Jane, she manages to work quite a bit into every paragraph:
Austen cared greatly what her readers thought of her novels, and she was anxious about whether Emma would hold the same appeal as her previous works. “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like,” her family recalled her saying when she began writing Emma, and when the novel was published she described herself as being in “a state of doubt as to her [Emma’s] reception in the World.” In particular she was concerned that readers who enjoyed the sparkling Pride and Prejudice would consider Emma to be “inferior in Wit,” while those who admired the morally serious Mansfield Park would think Emma “very inferior in good Sense.”
Wells is first and foremost a great teacher of Jane Austen, and for all its beauty and accessibility, this Annotated Deluxe Edition is clearly intended for students approaching Emma for the first time, as is made pretty explicit in the brief section called “Tips for reading Emma,” which includes common-sense advice like:
Pace yourself. If you’re reading for your own pleasure, take a chapter at a time. If you have a deadline – a class assignment or book group meeting – spread out the reading so that you’re doing some each day rather than big sections all at once. To the extent that you can, emulate the audience for whom Austen wrote: they read for pleasure, at their own pace.
(Not only do I know of no Austen fan who requires such advice, I know of no Austen fan who’s capable of following it; this must be at least my 35th re-reading of Emma, for example, and I could no more “pace myself” than I could sprout wings and fly to the moon – I gobbled it, immoderately, as always)
But even though these “tips” are clear and concise, there’s still, as mentioned, a mystery about this annotated volume of Emma … mainly involving the lack of annotations. It’s true that Wells provides eleven excellent “contextual essays” on things like food, health, love, or money in the world of Jane Austen’s novels, but such things, however interesting, do not an annotated edition make, as Wells must know as well as anybody. Yes, her readers will be fascinated to learn about dancing or social stratification in Emma from those brief closing essays, but first-timers reading the text of the novel itself will have none of the hand-holding that actual annotation is supposed to provide. When dear old hypochondriac Mr. Woodhouse says “I am too nice,” for example, there’s no authorial intervention to 
stop first-timers from immediately thinking they know what he’s saying, when he’s really not saying that. When we’re told that Mr. Martin has certainly read The Vicar of Wakefield but not The Romance of the Forest or Children of the Abbey, we’re being told something much more about him than the books on his nightstand, but readers who don’t already know that won’t learn it from this edition, unless they find it buried in one of those contextual essays at the back – certainly they’ll get no guidance on this or dozens of other small points while they’re actually reading the book itself.
It’s a small point, of course. As I’ve noted about annotated editions just in general, they’re often guilty of over-helping. Small misunderstandings or not, no beginning reader of Emma is going to fail to be utterly overjoyed by the book, and those beginning readers could hardly do better for themselves and their personal libraries than to invest the $17 in making this Penguin Classics Deluxe edition their Emma of choice. It’s just a bit odd, that’s all – which makes it par for the course during this particular Week O’ Penguins.