Emma Woodhouse because Jane is 'cold'. Unbeknown to Emma, Jane is secretly engaged to Frank, and therefore Emma's flirtation with Frank causes Jane great pain. Emma Woodhouse Emma Woodhouse is the 21-year-old protagonist of Jane Austen's novel "Emma". She is described in the novel's opening sentence as "handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition." Jane Austen, while writing the novel, called Emma, "a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like." Emma is an independent, wealthy woman who lives with her father in their home Hartfield in the English countryside near the village of Highbury. The novel
Reception history of Jane Austen 1870 that there was a distinctive American response to Austen. As Southam explains, "for American literary nationalists Jane Austen's cultivated scene was too pallid, too constrained, too refined, too downright unheroic". Austen was not democratic enough for American tastes and her canvas did not extend to the frontier themes that had come to define American literature. By the start of the 20th century, the American response was represented by the debate between the American novelist and critic William Dean Howells and the writer and humourist Mark Twain. In a series of essays, Howells helped make Austen into a canonical figure