Abstract
In including a wealthy and well-born woman who takes seriously the duties of a lady-patroness, a less wealthy and less well-born woman who would like to play lady-patroness, but of a select and preferably grateful few, an even less wealthy and less well-born woman who deserves an unpatronising patroness, and a woman less wealthy and less well-born still who is on the receiving end of patronage, Emma represents a nexus of obliging, obliged and obligation. Transactions of donation, reciprocation and exchange occur throughout the narrative and throughout are the subject of speculation, comment and judgement by the characters.
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Notes
For a reference guide to horse-drawn vehicles see Arthur Ingram, Horse Drawn Vehicles since 1760 in Colour (Poole: Blandford Press, 1977).
Thomas Malthus, Essay on the Principles of Population: An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers (1798), Book IV, ed. Donald Winch (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 332.
For some of the Austens’ light verse, see David Selwyn, Jane Austen and Leisure (London: Hambledon Press, 1999), pp. 277–86
and David Selwyn, The Poetry of Jane Austen and the Austen Family (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997).
Brian Southam, Jane Austen and the Navy, 2nd edn (Portsmouth: National Maritime Museum, 2005), p. 323.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Work of Marcel Mauss (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), Introduction, pp. 57–8.
Maurice Godelier, L’Enigme du don (1996), trans. Nora Scott, The Enigma of the Gift (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), p. 12.
Lewis Hyde, The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transformed the World (London: Random House, 1988; reprint Edinburgh: Canongate, 2006).
Daniel Roche, La Culture des apparences (1989), trans. Jean Birrell, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Régime (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 151.
Ariane Fennetaux, ‘Women’s Pockets and the Construction of Privacy in the Long Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 20:3 (Spring 2008), 307–34, 307–8.
Barbara Burman and Jonathan White, ‘Fanny’s Pockets: Consumption and Domestic Economy 1780–1850’, in Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan, eds, Women and Material Culture 1660–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 31–47, p. 37.
Mary Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the British Museum, 7 vols (prints 1771–1832), VI (London: British Museum, 1935–54; 1938), 6559.
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© 2014 Sandie Byrne
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Byrne, S. (2014). Emma: The Obliged and the Obligated. In: Jane Austen’s Possessions and Dispossessions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137406316_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137406316_6
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