Emma

Lionel Trilling (Essay Date 1965)

SOURCE: Trilling, Lionel. "Emma and the Legend of Jane Austen." In Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning, pp. 28-49. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965.

In the following essay, Trilling argues that Emma is the greatest of Austen's novels.

I

It is possible to say of Jane Austen, as perhaps we can say of no other writer, that the opinions which are held of her work are almost as interesting, and almost as important to think about, as the work itself. This statement, even with the qualifying "almost," ought to be, on its face, an illegitimate one. We all know that the reader should come to the writer with no preconceptions, taking no account of any previous opinion. But this, of course, he cannot do. Every established writer exists in the aura of his legend...