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 the "engaging manner by which she masks society's crude coercive power", and uses irony in a "generosity of spirit". In his 1957 essay ""Emma" and the Legend of Jane Austen", Trilling argued that Austen was the first novelist to handle the very modern problem of the "deep psychological change which accompanied the establishment of democratic society" which imposed a "psychological burden" on an individual which the "new necessity of conscious self-definition and self-criticism", as "there is no reality about which the modern person is more uncertain and more anxious than the reality of himself". Trilling argued that in modern society,