exhausting, and that's mostly fine

the one I always intend to love and never quite manage.

Emma herself is a brilliant piece of work. genuinely one of the very few heroines anywhere who gets to be actively bad at things without being punished into becoming somebody else by the last page. she meddles, she's a snob, she is wrong about every single thing she is most confident about, and Austen never once rescues her from it. that's great!

but it's SO slow. Highbury is a very small place and we visit all of it repeatedly and then again. the Frank Churchill business takes up about a year of my actual life. and the Harriet plot made me feel slightly ill — she's a real person being shoved round a board by somebody who thinks she's helping, and the book knows that, which doesn't stop it being uncomfortable to sit inside.

Box Hill though?? Box Hill is one of the best things Austen ever wrote. the joke at Miss Bates, and then the silence after it, and Knightley in the carriage going "badly done" — I get a stomach ache every time and I know it's coming.

my problem with Knightley is that he's been correcting her since she was thirteen and I can't fully get past it (Steph says I'm applying 2026 to 1815, which, fine, but I still have to live inside my own head).

seven. respect it enormously. reach for Persuasion.