2.4 "Ugh, As If!" Jane Austen's Emma and Clueless (pt. 1)
Welcome back to another episode! This week I’m talking about one of my favourite novels and one of my favourite movies: Emma by Jane Austen, and Clueless (1995). I talk about why Emma/Cher is so likable, how high society is just like high school, and why Cher and Josh are more compatible than Emma and Mr Knightley. This episode was really hard to cut down, so it’s actually been split into two parts. Tomorrow there will be a bonus episode to finish the discussion, so stay tuned!
Listen to the episode here
Download a full transcription of the episode here
Clueless links
Clueless on IMDb
Clueless on Rotten Tomatoes
Original 1995 New York Times review of Clueless by Janet Maslin
On why Clueless is a better adaptation of Emma than the 1996 movie
An interview with Amy Heckerling, writer and director of CluelessA ranking of modern film adaptations of Jane Austen novels (this is the article that mentions the 1990 film Metropolitan)
Emma links
Emma on Goodreads
The quote: “I am going to take a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like” is from Memoir of Jane Austen by James Edward Austen-Leigh, page 158.
Full quote from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, chapter four
“That is a man’s sentence; behind it one can see Johnson, Gibbon and the rest. It was a sentence that was unsuited for a woman’s use. Charlotte Brontë, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggar description. Jane Austen looked at it and laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it. Thus, with less genius for writing than Charlotte Brontë, she got infinitely more said. Indeed, since freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art, such a lack of tradition, such a scarcity and inadequacy of tools, must have told enormously upon the writing of women. Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes. And this shape too has been made by men out of their own needs for their own uses. There is no reason to think that the form of the epic or of the poetic play suit a woman any more than the sentence suits her.”
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929)