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"I was mad enough, however, to resent. I doubted her affection." (Vol. 2, p. 294)
Charles Edmund Brock
1898, 1906
13 by 8.3 cm (5 by 3 ¼ inches), framed
Jane Austen's Emma, Part II, facing p. 278.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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Do you remember the morning spent at Donwell? — There every little dissatisfaction that had occurred before came to a crisis. I was late; I met her walking home by herself, and wanted to walk with her, but she would not suffer it. She absolutely refused to allow me, which I then thought most unreasonable. Now, however, I see nothing in it but a very natural and consistent degree of discretion. While I, to blind the world to our engagement, was behaving one hour with objectionable particularity to another woman, was she to be consenting the next to a proposal which might have made every previous caution useless? — Had we been met walking together between Donwell and Highbury, the truth must have been suspected. — I was mad enough, however, to resent. — I doubted her affection. [Chapter 50, p. 295]
Here Brock contrasts the tenderness of the proposal between Knightley and Emma in the privacy of the Hartfield garden in Chapter 49 with the extremely awkward meeting between Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax in the road between Donwell and the village of Highbury. Brock emphasizes the emotional as well as the physical distance between the two fashionably dressed young people. By the end of the chapter, once Frank has received his uncle's endorsement of the secret engagement after the sudden death of the aunt, and the couple are back on easy terms; however, the moment realised shows Jane distant and reserved as she has had to accept the unsatisfactory position as governess at Bristol, and is undoubtedly upset about his very public attentions to Emma at the outing to Boxhill.
Austen, Jane. Emma. Ed. R. Brimley Johnson. With coloured illustrations by C. E. and H. M. Brock. The Novels and Letters of Jane Austen. New York & Philadelphia: Frank S. Holby, 1906. 2 vols.
Austen, Jane. Emma: An Annotated Edition. Ed. Bharat Tandon. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Belknap Press of Harvard U. P., 2012.
Created 10 April 2026