It's a great shame of mine that I've only read two of Ms Austen's novels - Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park. So, faced with an ebook reader and so many free ebooks (courtesy of the amazing Project Gutenberg), I found myself diving headlong into Hartfield with Emma.

You can't help but be caught up in the way her characters speak and think; it carries over to your day-to-day conversations, it pulls you in and suddenly - oh so suddenly - it is so very easy to be suddenly finding yourself gasp with horror at Harriet Smith's newest quest, or raise an eyebrow at Frank Churchill's dubious behaviour. And the piano, oh! The piano. Who didn't see that coming?

As this was my first foray into ebook territory, I was denied the pleasure of looking at the cover of the book every time I opened my bag. True, my iPad's new cover is very appealing, but it certainly doesn't hold a light to Regency artworks, neatly-set typeface, and brilliant colours. That being as it is, I've decided to select my own cover from the very many that exist in the Emma collections.





















Yes, I'm quite aware that it's an audio book, but, since we're ignoring that this isn't the version I actually read, I think the discrepancy is allowed. Besides, I rather like this version of Emma, she fits all of my expectations. She's beautiful and well-dressed, young but still rather thoughtful.

The plot was less complex than I had anticipated but it didn't leave me wanting. It is easy to read, easy to follow, engaging enough to make you think of it when you're not reading it yet casual enough for it to not demand every spare moment. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Emma annoyed me terribly when I first began reading the novel, but I soon found her far more entertaining and enthralling than her female contemporaries and it all turned out rather well - by about half-way through the novel I was interested in reading more from her to see how her thoughts and opinions progressed. Knightley,  on whom the irony of his leading male role and name are not lost, is a bit of a drip, but he turns out rather well too. Of course he'll never be a Mr Darcy, but how do you better someone who has a six-hour BBC drama dedicated to his story? Robert Martin was a rather predictable plot element, and I liked how Emma/Austen adapted her prose to reflect the change in her character's insights.

I'm not going to warble about Emma and her Knight(ley) but I thought I might digress briefly to think about Bath (in Emma's case, Highbury, which I think to Ms Austen looks rather the same).

















She conjures up the most amazing dwellings in her writing, and indeed this may very well be a fascinating area of research - buildings that rather come alive as you read them into existence. The estates, cottages, streets, priories - they all seem so very real, described down to the most minor details, outfitted with artworks, chairs in every corner, round tables (chosen by Emma herself) and other furnishings. Perhaps my favourite part of visiting Bath (aside from being a tourist with my mother and aunt, of course) was finally seeing the bustling streets where Jane walked, where she wrote, where she socialised...

















And, of course, the tea. We enjoyed a delicious afternoon tea at the Regency Tea Rooms where we all enjoyed Lady Catherine's Proper Cream Tea and where the pleasure of 'taking tea' really comes to light. You sit around a table sipping your preference of delightfully aromatic tea, politely eating scones with jam and clotted cream, and you have to talk. You must, because that is what you have come to the tea rooms (or in Emma's case, to her neighbour's home) to do. It's really very pleasant.


You could imagine Emma, in her afternoon leisure, sitting at a small table like this with Mr Woodhouse, being served tea and scones (with very little jam, he'd say). Even the staff are dressed to period with their pinnies and caps.

















I daresay even Graeme enjoyed a bit of Regency delights! I rather like the way that Jane, on the far wall, overlooks the tea rooms as we all step into her world for a few moments.

The ebook experience could have gone either way; I feel I need to pace myself through Jane Austen's collection (there are, after all, very few novels to work through) but it was a wise choice to start off my ebook experience with something that was going to be so predictably enjoyable and reassuring. The British Library Treasures App I mentioned in a previous post certainly heightened the experience as well, creating a more tangible reading experience (though paradoxically considerably less tangible, hidden beneath the gloss of the iPad screen!) with photographs, manuscript extracts and tidbits of Janeite history. The ebook certainly won't replace the real book - iPads don't smell nearly as nice - but they're convenient with their compact size and ability to make digital scans of your favourite extracts at the press of a button. Plus, as an added bonus for the ebook team, almost all the books I want to read are already out of copyright so Project Gutenberg provides them all readily and for free. Not yet an ebook convert, but I can appreciate the merits.

The only foreseeable ebook downside for me is that it's oh-so-easy to carry around many books at once (my current ebook library is sitting comfortably at 45) and with that comes the temptation to open up a new book at a new chapter at any given time. The temptation to read isn't so bad; it's the fact that the characters end up meeting each other in my thoughts if I don't give them time to settle down. In fact, Emma very recently met with Viy from Gogol's short stories - 'Viy', Gogol writes, 'is a colossal creation of folk imagination. The name is applied by people in Little Russia to the chief of the gnomes, whose eyelids reach to the ground.' I think they were a bit confused, but got along amiably after a spot of tea.