Emma (given name) conquest this name became common in England. It was revived in the 18th century, perhaps in part due to Matthew Prior's poem "Henry and Emma" (1709). It was also used by Jane Austen for the central character, the matchmaker Emma Woodhouse, in her novel "Emma" (1815). It has been among the top names given to baby girls in the United States, England, Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Ireland, France, Sweden, Belgium, Russia, Canada, Australia, Norway, New Zealand, Hungary, Finland, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain in the past 10 years. It began gaining popularity in the United Kingdom during the 1960s.
Reception history of Jane Austen of Austen's works. Almost simultaneously, influential critic Q. D. Leavis argued in "Critical Theory of Jane Austen's Writing", published in "Scrutiny" in the early 1940s, that Austen was a professional, not an amateur, writer. Harding's and Leavis's articles were followed by another revisionist treatment by Marvin Mudrick in "Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery" (1952). Mudrick portrayed Austen as isolated, defensive, and critical of her society, and described in detail the relationship he saw between Austen's attitude toward contemporary literature and her use of irony as a technique to contrast the realities of her society with what she felt