Austen must have felt the contradictory reader response that Fanny Price had aroused, opinions ranging from praise to deep dislike (Austen's mother calling Fanny ‘insipid’ testifies to the latter). Prior to Emma's composition, the novelist is said to have declared: ‘I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.’ This statement has more often invited critics ‘to search out what is objectionable about Emma than [regard it] as a calculated challenge to the judgments of her audience’. Some are uncomfortable with it to the point of denying it having originated from the novelist at all. For example, Barbara Z. Thaden dismisses the statement, arguing that Emma is quite different from all Austen's heroines and that, if we see Jane Fairfax as the heroine that Austen initially had in mind, we end up recognizing that Emma is not meant to be a sympathetic character at all. What I wish to draw attention to is that Thaden's comment has curiously more in common with Austen's presumed statement than Thaden is ready to admit. Whether Emma is an atypical case among Austen's female protagonists, as Thaden argues, or a heroine liked by no one but her creator, as Austen's handed-down expression suggests, Emma has something of exclusivity and novelty about it. Both accounts announce a deviation from what had been the practice of the novelist up to that point, a deviation that sets the heroine and the novel apart from the rest.