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 writing in a manner expected of a woman writer in her age while, at the same time, undercutting such expectations . Devoney Looser in the 1995 book "Jane Austen and the Discourses of Feminism" argued in her introduction that there were a number of ways in which Austen could be placed, not merely within a feminist tradition, but as herself a feminist. Using the theories of Michel Foucault as their guide, Casey Finch and Peter Bowen in their 1990 essay, "'The Tittle-Tattle of Highbury': Gossip and the Free Indirect Style in "Emma"", argued that the free indirect discourse in