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 used realism as a way of attacking patriarchy from the outside as opposed to subverting it from within by irony as Gilbert and Gubar claimed. The interest generated in Austen by these critics led to the discovery and study of other woman writers of the time. Moreover, with the publication of Julia Prewitt Brown's "Jane Austen's Novels: Social Change and Literary Form" (1979), Margaret Kirkham's "Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction" (1983), and Claudia L. Johnson's "Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel" (1988), scholars were no longer able to easily argue that Austen was "apolitical, or even unqualifiedly 'conservative'". Kirkham,