Perhaps the best description of style in Emma is that it is quietly subtle. The tone of the book is one of absolute ease and surety on the part of the author, who handles her material with such deft touches that an unperceptive reader may conclude that the story and the writing are very ordinary. But Austen's method is nearer that of the magician than that of the boxer.
She can be disarmingly simple and direct as, for instance, she sets up Emma's situation at the very beginning of the book; but she is also carefully and unobtrusively setting up objects of satire when she refers to Emma's always doing just as she liked or to Mr. Woodhouse's having been a valetudinarian all his life. When she describes Mr. Elton as "a young man living alone without liking it," she pins down a character specimen as neatly intact as can be done. The wit and sharp edge of her phrasing are illustrated when she describes Isabella's Christmas visit with her father and sister: "It was a delightful visit; — perfect, in being much too short." She also makes use of the subtle antithetic balance of word and phrasing derived from the eighteenth-century literary stylists: When Frank Churchill's visit is again postponed, Mrs. Weston, "after all her concern for what her husband was to suffer, suffered a great deal more herself." Although she avoids figurative images, Austen is adept at coining pregnant abstractions in the manner of Dr. Samuel Johnson: note the "apparatus of happiness" placed in the dialogue of Mrs. Elton.
In general, her style achieves exactly the proper distancing she wants between the reader and the fictional subject (see above under Point of View), and the reader is affected whether he is aware of it or not. To do this she may withdraw herself (and the reader with her) somewhat from the immediate subject by using a euphemistic circumlocution that contains an ironic barb. For instance, in reference to Mr. Elton's marriage and Harriet's feelings for him, Emma's thoughts are stated with third-person indirectness as "It was not to be doubted that poor Harriet's attachment had been an offering to conjugal unreserve"; to grasp the irony one may note the connotations of the world offering, while to comprehend the distancing of phraseology he may compare a direct statement like "At some intimate moment he told his wife of Harriet." A major difference is that Austen's phrasing disengages us just enough to let us laugh at what is, after all, a natural process of married communication.
