Says Emma, mock-pompously, showing off to Harriet Smith:

       The course of true love never did run smooth—

 A Hartfield edition of Shakespeare would have a long note on that passage.

Thus does Austen, through Emma, laugh gently at scholarly annotation. How she would have laughed to think that her own work, within two hundred years, would require it!

This year brings not one, but two new annotated editions of Jane Austen’s Emma, first published in 1815. Both come as part of a series of annotated versions of Austen novels. There is clearly a demand for annotated editions. Jane Austen’s works continue to grow in popularity, including among young women. Many people have seen the film and television versions, and have then turned to the novels. And although Austen’s prose is among the clearest and purest ever written in English, such readers must find a great deal which is puzzling.

This fact was brought home to me as I conducted a brief internet search relating to the works under review. Bloggers and their readers have greeted the annotated versions with relief, often expressed in misspelt and ungrammatical comments that reveal the extent of the problem that the annotators are attempting to address. This is the profound ignorance of language, literature, history, and religion, of even those readers who have the intelligence and taste to enjoy Austen. In previous generations, readers of Austen might first have been broadly familiar with the Bible,