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 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