Earlier this year when I was in the middle of reading Jane Austen, I was browsing one day in the local Oxfam bookshop and came across an Austen sequel - Emma in Love by Emma Tennant. After reading the blurb on the cover, I replaced the book on the shelves. I'd gathered that Emma and Mr Knightley's married life might not have turned out so well, and I didn't want to know. Incurable romantic? You bet. Deluded that marriages based on love always lead to happy ever after? Not at all. But if Tennant wanted to explore that territory, she could have written about someone else - about Gemma or Emmeline or Esme. There's no need to mess up something as good as Emma.
These thoughts are prompted by - yet one more Emma for this post - Emma Campbell Webster. She is troubled by Austen's happy endings: troubled, more particularly, by the fact that the marriages that conclude each of the six stories of her central female protagonists are indeed endings. This is not, Campbell Webster explains, specific to Austen; it's a plot device that's 'been around for aeons'. But, in any case, why it's troubling is in suggesting closure, the end of freedom, adventure, possibility.
Two things strike me about this. First, even in Jane Austen there is plenty of material from which we can see that marriage is a beginning as well as an end, and that the beginning which it is isn't always of a state of unalloyed bliss. In Pride and Prejudice the happy ending for Lizzy Bennet sits beside Charlotte Lucas's earlier settling for a life with Mr Collins - something that is going to take considerable endurance. We also have Lizzy's observations on her father's not having been the best of husbands to her mother, as well as a rather vivid impression of the tests the daily company of her mother would have involved. In Mansfield Park we see what kind of a life Fanny Price's mother has lived, thanks to her marriage to a man who is 'coarse and indifferent'; and this is to say nothing of Maria Bertram's marriage to Mr Rushworth, both the motives for and the early fate of it. In Emma, though the heroine's mother is already deceased when the novel begins, you don't have to have too much imagination to figure out what it would be like to be hooked up with a ninny like Mr Woodhouse. Likewise in Persuasion, Sir Walter Elliot doesn't come across as everyone's cup of tea for a lifelong companion. One is also given a painful sense - albeit ultimately resolved - of what it can mean to be kept apart from someone you love, when marriage to them is what you actually want. And so on. Austen's is a world of happy endings, it is true, but it isn't a simple - blind - world of them, unless we wilfully isolate those endings from the life surrounding them.
Second, endings in this matter are context-dependent. Everyone knows that the union that concludes the story of a romance has an aftermath. But for certain purposes that aftermath is just something else. We're satisfied to know how this bit ends. There's nothing wrong with leaving it there. Are we obliged in telling of a heroic victory to follow through on the life of the hero and see that he became a drunk and finally a suicide? Not necessarily. It depends what the story is. If the mystery of who committed the crime is solved, you can call it a day. What the detective did next doesn't have to interest you. Again, it doesn't matter whether Tony Soprano got whacked on that (last) evening or not.
Emma and Mr Knightley are happy in their love for each other, and that's it. They are happy in that fictional moment, and forever happy in it. One of the finest things I ever read comes in those pages where Emma realizes, through her conversation with Harriet Smith about Harriet's feelings for Mr Knightley, that she - Emma - loves him. It is sufficient unto itself.