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 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