by Jane Austen
Mr. Weston announces Frank’s second visit (here)
Early to Mid-May
Beginning of second visit of Frank Churchill
The Churchills were supposed to come to London at the beginning of May (see above entry), but “they were not in town quite so soon as had been imagined.”
Mid- to Late May
The Churchills move from London to Richmond
They decided to move after ten days in London and “were going to remove immediately”; the new “house was taken for May and June.”
Late May
Ball at the Crown Inn
Frank wrote to say he could come “very soon after the Churchills had removed to Richmond,” and only “a very few to-morrows” intervened after that (here).
Next Day
Harriet’s adventure with the Gypsies
End of May
Harriet announces her change of heart about Mr. Elton and her new romantic interest
This was “a very few days” after her adventure.
Early June
Frank Churchill’s blunder about Mr. Perry
It occurred soon after “June opened upon Hartfield” (here).
Mid-June
Mr. Knightley offers to invite people to Donwell
June 23
Strawberry-picking party at Donwell
It was “almost Midsummer” (June 24); this date can be derived from subsequent events.
June 24
Box Hill Picnic
It was the day after the party at Donwell (here).
Frank Churchill returns to Richmond (here)
This was soon after the return from Box Hill.
Jane Fairfax accepts position as governess (here)
Jane told Mrs. Elton in the evening.
June 25
Emma visits Miss Bates
She went the morning after Box Hill.
Mr. Knightley leaves for London (here)
Emma saw him on returning from the Bateses’.
June 26
Mrs. Churchill dies
It is later specified as the 26th (here), and it occurred not “above six-and-thirty hours” after Frank Churchill’s return to Richmond (this is how the preceding events can be dated).
End of June
Emma attempts to assist Jane Fairfax but is rebuffed
Early July Thursday
Frank and Mr. Churchill move to Windsor
They go soon after the funeral leaves. For days of the week, see subsequent entries.
Sunday
Frank receives note from Jane confirming her rejection of him; he speaks to his uncle and obtains permission for the marriage
The note arrived two days after their move to Windsor; see next entry for why the second event must have occurred the same day.
Monday
Frank reconciles with Jane and tells Mr. and Mrs. Weston of his engagement
Mrs. Weston tells Emma of it (here)
He said he saw Jane before her late breakfast (here), and Mrs. Weston said he had learned of Jane’s decision to break with him only the previous day. This was also “about ten days after Mrs. Churchill’s decease” (here), indicating that Frank and Mr. Churchill could not have moved to Windsor until almost a week after her death.
Emma tells Harriet; Harriet reveals her hopes for Mr. Knightley (here)
This was just after Emma learned the news.
Tuesday
Emma tells Harriet they will not talk for now
Mrs. Weston visits Emma to discuss Jane
She later described it as Tuesday (here); Emma spent the rest of the day and the evening after Harriet’s revelation agonizing over Mr. Knightley (here). (here)
Wednesday
Mr. Knightley returns from London
The stormy weather that began on the previous day continued “all the following morning” before clearing in the afternoon, after which Mr. Knightley saw Emma in the garden.
Emma and Mr. Knightley become engaged (here)
Thursday
Emma writes to Harriet, receives Frank
Churchill’s letter of explanation
Mr. Knightley reads letter before Emma (here)
Friday
Emma visits Jane Fairfax
Emma mentioned a meeting at the Crown tomorrow as “for Saturday” (here)
Early to Mid-July
Harriet goes to London
It occurred soon after Emma’s engagement to Mr. Knightley. It was stated later she was in London “a month at least” (here), and her return was in the middle of August (see below).
Mid- to Late July
Mrs. Weston gives birth
It occurred before the following event.
Late July
The engagement of Emma and Mr. Knightley is revealed to Highbury
After the engagement, Emma decided to defer announcing it for two weeks (here), and waited until Mrs. Weston was recovering.
Early to Mid-August
News of Harriet’s engagement to Robert Martin
It occurred five weeks after Emma’s engagement (here), which was early July.
Emma sees Frank Churchill at the Westons’ (here)
It was the same day Emma learned this news.
Middle of August
Harriet returns to Highbury
This was “a very few days” after above event.
September
Marriage of Harriet Smith and Robert Martin
October
Marriage of Emma and Mr. Knightley
It occurred “within a month from the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Martin.”
November
Marriage of Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill
This is the anticipated date.
Bibliography
EDITIONS OF EMMA
Chapman, R. W., ed., The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. IV: Emma (Oxford, 1933)
Cronin, Richard, and Dorothy McMillan, eds., The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen: Emma (Cambridge, UK, 2005)
Kinsley, James, ed., Emma (Oxford, 1971)
Parrish, Stephen, ed., Emma: A Norton Critical Edition (New York, 2000)
Stafford, Fiona, ed., Emma (London, 2003)
WORKS BY JANE AUSTEN
The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen (Cambridge, UK, 2005–2009)
Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford, 1995)
The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen, 6 vols., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1933)
The Poetry of Jane Austen and the Austen Family, ed. David Selwyn (Iowa City, 1997)
WORKS RELATING TO JANE AUSTEN
Biographical
Austen, Caroline, Reminiscences of Caroline Austen (Guildford, 1986)
Austen-Leigh, J. E., A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections (Oxford, 2002; originally published 1871)
Austen-Leigh, William, and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: A Family Record, revised and enlarged by Deirdre Le Faye (Boston, 1989)
Harman, Claire, Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World (Edinburgh, 2009)
Honan, Park, Jane Austen: Her Life (New York, 1989)
Jenkins, Elizabeth, Jane Austen (New York, 1949)
Laski, Marghanita, Jane Austen and Her World (New York, 1969)
Le Faye, Deirdre, Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels (New York, 2002)
Mitten, G. E., Jane Austen and Her Times (Philadelphia, 2003; originally published 1905)
Myer, Valerie Grosvenor, Jane Austen: Obstinate Heart (New York, 1997)
Nokes, David, Jane Austen: A Life (New York, 1997)
Ross, Josephine, Jane Austen: A Companion (New Brunswick, NJ, 2003)
Tucker, George Holbert, Jane Austen the Woman: Some Biographical Insights (New York, 1994)
Critical
Auerbach, Emily, Searching for Jane Austen (Madison, WI, 2004)
Babb, Howard S., Jane Austen’s Novels: The Fabric of Dialogue (Columbus, OH, 1962)
Bailey, John, Introductions to Jane Aus
ten (Oxford, 1931)
Bloom, Harold, ed., Jane Austen’s Emma (Philadelphia, 1987)
Booth, Wayne, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1983)
Bradbrook, Frank, Jane Austen: Emma (London, 1961)
Brooke, Christopher, Jane Austen: Illusion and Reality (Cambridge, UK, 1999)
Burrows, J. F., Jane Austen’s Emma (Sydney, 1968)
Bush, Douglas, Jane Austen (New York, 1975)
Butler, Marilyn, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford, 1975)
Cecil, Lord David, A Portrait of Jane Austen (New York, 1979)
Cockshut, A. O. J., Man and Woman: A Study of Love and the Novel, 1740–1940 (New York, 1978)
Craig, G. Armour, “Jane Austen’s Emma: The Truths and Disguises of Human Disclosure,” in In Defense of Reading: A Reader’s Approach to Literary Criticism, eds. Reuben A. Brower and Richard Poirier (New York, 1962)
Craik, W. A., Jane Austen: The Six Novels (London, 1965)
Duckworth, Alistair M., The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels (Baltimore, 1971)
Emsley, Sarah, Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues (New York, 2005)
Firkins, Oscar W., Jane Austen (New York, 1947)
Gard, Roger, Jane Austen’s Novels: The Art of Clarity (New Haven, CT, 1992)
Graham, Peter, Jane Austen and Charles Darwin (Aldershot, UK, 2008)
Grey, J. David, ed., The Jane Austen Companion (New York, 1986)
Hardy, Barbara, A Reading of Jane Austen (New York, 1979)
Horwitz, Barbara, Jane Austen and the Question of Women’s Education (New York, 1991)
Hough, Graham, Selected Essays (Cambridge, UK, 1978)
Hudson, Glenda, Sibling Love and Incest in Jane Austen’s Fiction (New York, 1999)
Jefferson, Douglas, Jane Austen’s Emma: A Landmark in English Fiction (London, 1977)
Jones, Vivien, How to Study a Jane Austen Novel (Basingstoke, UK, 1987)
Kaye-Smith, Sheila, and G. B. Stern, More About Jane Austen (New York, 1949)
———, Speaking of Jane Austen (New York, 1944)
Kennedy, Margaret, Jane Austen (London, 1950)
Lascelles, Mary, Jane Austen and Her Art (Oxford, 1939)
Liddell, Robert, The Novels of Jane Austen (London, 1963)
Litz, A. Walton, Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development (New York, 1965)
Lodge, David, ed., Jane Austen: Emma: A Casebook (London, 1969)
MacDonagh, Oliver, Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds (New Haven, CT, 1991)
Moler, Kenneth L., Jane Austen’s Art of Illusion (Lincoln, NE, 1968)
Mooneyham, Laura, Romance, Language and Education in Jane Austen’s Novels (New York, 1988)
Morini, Massimiliano, Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques (Farnham, UK, 2009)
Morris, Ivor, Jane Austen and the Interplay of Character (London, 1999)
Mudrick, Marvin, Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery (Princeton, NJ, 1952)
Nardin, Jane, Those Elegant Decorums: The Concept of Propriety in Jane Austen’s Novels (Albany, NY, 1973)
Odmark, John, An Understanding of Jane Austen’s Novels (Oxford, 1981)
Paris, J. Bernard, Character and Conflict in Jane Austen’s Novels (Detroit, 1978)
Roberts, Warren, Jane Austen and the French Revolution (New York, 1979)
Ruderman, Anne C., The Pleasures of Virtue: Political Thought in the Novels of Jane Austen (Lanham, MD, 1995)
Scheuermann, Mona, Reading Jane Austen (New York, 2009)
Southam, B. C., ed., Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols. (London, 1968–1987)
Stovel, Bruce, and Lynn Weinlos Gregg, The Talk in Jane Austen (Alberta, Canada, 2002)
Sutherland, John, Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?: More Puzzles in Classic Fiction (New York, 1997)
———, Is Heathcliff a Murderer?: Puzzles in 19th-Century Fiction (New York, 1996)
———, Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet?: Further Puzzles in Classic Fiction (Oxford, 1999)
Tave, Stuart, Some Words of Jane Austen (Chicago, 1973)
Ten Harmsel, Henrietta, Jane Austen: A Study in Fictional Conventions (The Hague, 1964)
Thomson, Clara Linklater, Jane Austen: A Survey (London, 1929)
Valihora, Karen, Austen’s Oughts: Judgment After Locke and Shaftesbury (Newark, DE, 2010)
Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley, CA, 1957)
Weisenfarth, Joseph, The Errand of Form: An Assay of Jane Austen’s Art (New York, 1967)
Wright, Andrew, Jane Austen’s Novels: A Study in Structure (Harmondsworth, UK, 1953)
WORKS OF HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
General Histories and Reference
Burton, Elizabeth, The Pageant of Georgian England (New York, 1967)
Craik, W. A., Jane Austen in Her Time (London, 1969)
Daunton, M. J., Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social History of Britain, 1700–1850 (Oxford, 1995)
Encyclopaedia Britannica; or, A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Miscellaneous Literature, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh, 1797) and 4th ed. (Edinburgh, 1810)
Halevy, Elie, A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1: England in 1815, trans. E. I. Watkin and D. A. Barker, 2nd ed. (London, 1949)
Harvey, A. D., Britain in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York, 1978)
Hay, Douglas, and Nicholas Rogers, Eighteenth-Century English Society: Shuttles and Swords (Oxford, 1997)
Hole, Christina, English Home-Life, 1500–1800 (London, 1947)
Marshall, Dorothy, English People in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1956)
———, Industrial England, 1776–1851 (New York, 1973)
McKendrick, Neil, and John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, IN, 1982)
Olsen, Kirstin, All Things Austen: An Encyclopedia of Austen’s World, 2 vols. (Westport, CT, 2005)
Perkin, Harold, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (London, 1969)
Rule, John, Albion’s People: English Society, 1714–1815 (London, 1992)
Todd, Janet, ed., Jane Austen in Context (New York, 2005)
Language and Names
The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, 1971)
Dunkling, Leslie, and William Gosling, The Facts on File Dictionary of First Names (New York, 1983)
Johnson, Samuel, Dictionary of the English Language, ed. Alexander Chalmers (London, 1994; repr. of 1843 ed.)
Lane, Maggie, Jane Austen and Names (Bristol, UK, 2002)
Page, Norman, The Language of Jane Austen (Oxford, 1972)
Phillipps, K. C., Jane Austen’s English (London, 1970)
English Nationalism
Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT, 1992)
Langford, Paul, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650–1850 (New York, 2000)
Newman, Gerald, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830 (New York, 1997)
Cultural and Literary Background
Ali, Muhsin Jassim, Scheherazade in England (Washington, DC, 1981)
Benwell, Gwen, and Arthur Waugh, Sea Enchantress: The Tale of the Mermaid and her Kin (New York, 1965)
Black, Jeremy, Culture in Eighteenth-Century England: A Subject for Taste (London, 2005)
Bradbrook, Frank W., Jane Austen and Her Predecessors (Cambridge, UK, 1966)
Brewer, John, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1997)
Caracciolo, Peter L., ed., The Arabian Nights in English Literature (New York, 1988)
Franklin, Colin, Shakespeare Domesticated: The Eighteenth-Century Editions (Aldershot, UK, 1991)
Marder, Louis, His Exits and Entrances: The Story of Shakespeare’s Reputation (Philadelphia, 1963)
Silver, Carole G., Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (New York, 1999)
&n
bsp; Smith, David Nichol, Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1928; repr. 1967)
Wahba, Magdi, “Madame de Genlis in England,” Comparative Literature, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Summer, 1961), pp. 221–238.
Marriage and the Family
Gillis, John R., For Better, for Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (New York, 1985)
Jones, Hazel, Jane Austen and Marriage (London, 2009)
Laslett, Peter, The World We Have Lost: England Before the Industrial Age, 2nd ed. (New York, 1971)
Stone, Lawrence, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London, 1977)
Tadmor, Naomi, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge, UK, 2001)
Trumbach, Randolph, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1978)
The Position of Women
Barker, Hannah, and Elaine Chalus, eds., Women’s History: Britain, 1700–1850: An Introduction (London, 2005)
Brophy, Elizabeth Bergen, Women’s Lives and the 18th-Century English Novel (Tampa, FL, 1991)
Gevirtz, Karen, Life After Death: Widows and the English Novel (Newark, DE, 2005)
Hill, Bridget, Women Alone: Spinsters in England, 1660–1850 (New Haven, CT, 2001)
Horn, Pamela, Victorian Countrywomen (Oxford, 1991)
Shoemaker, Robert B., Gender in English Society, 1650–1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (London, 1998)
Tague, Ingrid H., Women of Quality: Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690–1760 (Woodbridge, UK, 2002)
Vickery, Amanda, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (London, 1998)
Children and Childbearing
Bayne-Powell, Rosamond, The English Child in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1939)
Fletcher, Anthony, Growing Up in England: The Experience of Childhood, 1600–1914 (New Haven, CT, 2008)
Lewis, Judith Schneid, In the Family Way: Childbearing in the British Aristocracy, 1760–1860 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1986)
McMaster, Juliet, “The Children in Emma,” Persuasions 14 (1992): 62–67