Living In Jane Austen's 'Emma'

Then again, part of the thrill lay in my discovering new facets of Emma on every rereading, things that I hadn't been aware that the novel was saying, glancing at, or knowingly avoiding. If Austen's writing might seem light on overt references to the grand historical narratives of her time, it doesn't mean that she was either ignorant or dismissive of them; rather, Emma sketches an alternative model of what it means to live in history, by offering a wealth of little details that connote much larger complexes of social, economic, and emotional exchange. The choice of one cheese, card-game, or piano over another often carries great weight in the novel, but Austen could have some confidence that her original readers would 'get' those glancing references without her having to spell them out, whereas we might now need exactly the kind of clarification that footnotes can provide - not an aggressive, interpretative corralling, but a laying open of possible contexts, with which a reader can do as much or as little as she or he desires.  Read all: Huffington post