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Mr Woodhouse please sit down

LMAO the chapter concludes with Mr Woodhouse devoutly refusing to acknowledge that all of Mr Perry’s children definitely had some wedding cake

Chapter 3 — Mr Woodhouse likes the company of a small circle of friends, and he makes them all come to him. Mr Woodhouse is me.

I bought WiFi on this plane ride to do this.

It is so sweet that Emma seems to keep Mr Woodhouse occupied and in the company of friends at very little effort to himself.

Ooh never mind, the WiFi is real brittle

Mr Eston lives alone? My first impulse is to think of that as a little odd. I’m also of the impression that he’s kinda young.

OH I see. We’re doing a Mean Girls-style tour of the cafeteria, and we’re finding out who Mr Woodhouse sits with at lunch. So first we’re introduced to young Mr Eston, who lives alone, for some reason, apparently reluctantly. Then it’s a trio of ladies.

OH thank you. This is very helpful. I made the mistake of assuming the servants were also people. bsky.app/profile/cdrl...

Anyway, three ladies also hang out a lot with the Woodhouses. They’re carted back and forth so often that Mr Woodhouse completely takes for granted what an endeavor that is, but if it happened only once a year he would get it.

I’m getting the sense that Mr Woodhouse is very gently daffy.

Mrs Bates is an old vicar’s old widow who is very old, and she lives with her daughter, Miss Bates, who is not Old-old, but she is old enough that it’s an impediment to her prospects. Also Miss Bates is mid in every respect, except that she is incredibly convivial, which people seem to like.

I feel like the book is giving us a foil to Emma in Miss Bates. They’re both affable, but Emma is young, pretty, clever, and rich. Miss Bates is middle-aged, plain, not especially sharp, and has no money.

But Miss Bates is so overwhelmingly affable and good-natures that people love her in spite of her being aggressively mid, and I can’t decide if that’s a little mean on the part of the book.

Is Emma the character as judgmental as Emma the book? This is such a frank and unkind description of Miss Bates, apparently a gijinka of a subtly scented votive candle.

Now we have Mrs Goddard, who runs a school, but not a very good school. She is also very mid, but very kindly and caring to her students. Okay, so this really is the world as Emma sees it in the narrative.

MISS TAYLOR IS MRS WESTON, FINALLY!!! Good job, Woodhouses. I assume this means they’re briskly trotting through the stages of grief toward a dull, warm acceptance.

LMAO Mrs Goddard asks if she can bring a young Miss Smith to the card-table gathering at the Woodhouses, to which Emma graciously approves, and here we find out that Emma finds the gatherings very boring.

The very chipper air of responsibility and care for Mr Woodhouse’s happiness suddenly tripping into to a moment where Emma is like, “OH THANK GOD a young person!” has me rolling 😆

“Harriet Smith was the natural daughter of somebody.” Okay.

the treatment of children, from rich to poor, in this book is so eye-opening

I really like the Romola Garai adaptation of Emma for the way it immediately shoves three children losing their mothers - Jane Fairfax, Frank Churchill, and Emma Woodhouse - under your nose, and forces you to recognise that they all start out with that same terrible thing in common.

But it makes me wonder about Harriet. We eventually learn a little about her father, but I don't think her mother is ever mentioned. I always vaguely assumed she was dead as well.

Harriet Smith is described as, essentially, a Kewpie (shout out to my girl, Rose O’Neill!!!), which Emma seems to enjoy in a “Daddy can I pretty please have this dolly” sort of way.

Okay, so Emma knows the Martins are good and decent people, but she’s still like, “REGARDLESS, Harriet must have better influences than those people—better influences such as, I suppose, my-own-self.

Oh my god Mr Woodhouse and his vapors wishing the pretty table settings just didn’t have all that food on it 😭😭😭

Yeah. Dang. We assume that Lydia and Wickham were having Unofficial Sex in P&P but here we show proof of Unsanctioned Goings On.