Status Updates From The Cambridge Companion to ...

"In making music the visible sign of Jane Fairfax's cultivation, sensitivity and highly wrought consciousness, Austen was doing something new. She was valuing music as art, as the outward manifestation of a largeness of soul - a combination of talent, deep feeling, serious application and intellectual acuity - rather than simply proof of obedience to custom, a modicum of discipline and a feminine desire to please."

"... And if Emma turns so often on kindness, that is another reason why it is so exhilarating a novel. Jane Austen was fond of Emma and it shows, for Emma, like her heroine at her most vital, is filled with 'the real good-will of a mind delighted with its own ideas'."

"The novel's cunning and original textual plots match the imaginative schemes, the creative play and invention of its characters. It is full of clever, entertaining and ultimately serious mischief, underpinned by sympathy for the challenges facing an intelligent and gifted young woman in ordinary, mundane society. ..."

'As Michael Lewis, author of "Flash Boys" (2013), commented, "It's hard to dramatize the quotidian in a way that makes it fresh for readers. It's like describing the air we breathe." ... "The air we breathe" was Austen's gift to the novel.'

"Austen felt the social and gender-related claustrophobia of her time as surely as Mary Wollstonecraft, although, unlike her revolutionary predecessor, she had no active desire fundamentally to replace that system; rather, her imagination offered her a means of bearing the unbearable, of outflanking and comically transfiguring the world she could not escape."