To emphasize the stagnation (死气沉沉) and the narrowness of the society depicted in Jane Austin’’s novels is to take a narrow and mechanical view of them. Emma is not a period piece, nor is what is sometimes called a "comedy of manners". We read it to illuminate not only, the past but also the present. And we must face here in both its crudity and its important a question. Exactly what relevance and helpfulness does Emma have for us today In what sense does a novel dealing skillfully and realistically with a society and its standards, which are dead and gone forever, have value in our very different world today Stated in such term, the question itself is unsatisfactory. If Emma today captures our imagination and engages our sympathies (as, in fact, it does), then either it has some genuine value for us, or else there is something wrong with the way we give our sympathy and our values are pretty useless. Put this way, it is clear that anyone who enjoys Emma and then remarks "but of course it has no relevance today" is, in fact, debasing the novel, looking at it not as living, enjoyable work of art but as a mere dead picture of a past society. Such an attitude is fatal both to art and to life. It can be assumed that Emma has relevance. The helpful approach is to ask why this novel still has the power to move us today. What gives Emma its power to move us is the realism and depth of feeling behind Jane Austin’’s attitudes. She examines with a scrupulous (小心谨慎的) yet passionate and critical precision the actual problems of her world. That this world is narrow cannot be denied, but the value of a work of art rests on the depth and truth of the experience it communicates, and such qualities cannot be identified with the breath of the work’’s panorama (概观). A conversation between two people in a grocery store may tell us more about a world war than a volume of dispatches from the front. The stilliest of all criticism of Jane Austen is the one that blames of the news papers she read. She wrote about what she genuinely understood, and artist can do more. The author would probably disagree with those critics or readers who find that the society in Jane Austin’’s novel is ________.