In the town of Highbury Emma Woodhouse, a handsome, clever, and rich young lady of twenty-one, is left alone with her indulgent widower father by the marriage of Miss Taylor, her governess and friend of sixteen years, to Mr. Weston. Emma's older sister Isabella is married to John Knightley, and the Knightleys live sixteen miles away in London with their five children.
At teatime the day after the marriage, Mr. Woodhouse, who has been a valetudinarian all his life and is against any kind of change, speaks of "Poor Miss Taylor!"—not because of Mr. Weston, who is a fine and wealthy man, but simply because of the fact of marriage. Emma is trying to appease him when George Knightley, John's brother, a sensible and quite wealthy man of about thirty-seven or thirty-eight who lives at his Donwell Abbey estate a mile from the Woodhouse estate of Hartfield, pays them a cheerful visit.
When Emma states that she herself made the match between Miss Taylor and Mr. Weston, George says that she only guessed that it would come and Mr. Woodhouse asks her not to make any more. Emma's reply is that she will make only one more—for Mr. Elton, the twenty-six-year-old rector—to which George answers that she should "leave him to chuse his own wife."
