Jane Austen began Emma shortly before the hiatus in the war with France that followed on Napoleon's abdication in April 1814, and she finished it in March 1815 just at the moment that the deposed Emperor was resuming power. The peace may have been an illusory one, but if Austen wrote with the prospect of peace in view her timing was impeccable for Waterloo was history and Napoleon already on St Helena when the novel finally appeared. It was Pride and Prejudice that caused Winston Churchill to exclaim over the benignly becalmed lives led by Austen's characters, and in many ways Emma marks a return to the pacific settings of the earlier fiction. It also picks up on many of the earlier themes with a directness that suggests that Austen was consciously engaging in a rite of restoration. Indeed, at first sight the novel seems, for all its brilliance and intricacy, to be a summation of the work initially drafted in the nineties, but although the old Enlightenment motifs recur, many prove on closer inspection to have undergone a subtle sea change.

Emma, the imaginist, springs (to an extent seldom realized) from the same eighteenth-century tradition of female quixotry that gave birth to the heroine of Northanger Abbey, for her plots owe as much to romance fiction as do the frenzied perceptions of Catherine Morland, even if their source is relatively concealed.