Do you agree with the statement that Emmais a novel of marriage and courtship in early English society? Illustrate your answer with examples from the...

Yes,
is a novel of marriage and courtship in early-nineteenth-century English
society. The novel opens, for instance, with the marriage of Emma's governess, Miss Taylor, who
becomes Mrs. Weston, and that change in Emma's life triggers the rest of the novel's
action.

Emma insists she made the Taylor/Weston match and decides to engage
in more matchmaking, this time with her new friend Harriet Smith. Her attempts to orchestrate a
marriage between Emma and the Highbury rector, Mr. Elton, misfire comically because Emma is
blind to the fact that it is she, not Harriet, that Mr. Elton wants to marry.

On a more serious note, in a culture in which marriage was almost the only viable
option for a woman, Emma interferes with what would have been an excellent match between Harriet
and Mr. Martina result that could have had dire consequences for Harriet's future had events in
this novel not worked out in the end.

Emma enters into a flirtation with
Frank Churchill and toys with the idea of marrying him, though eventually decides she doesn't
want him. What she doesn't know until the end of the novel is that he is secretly engaged to
Jane Fairfax. As with Harriet and Mr. Martin, this is a vitally important match for Jane, who is
poor and very much dependent on marrying the wealthy Frank to save her from a life as a
governess.

Of course, a central courtship throughout the book (though the
main players don't realize it at first) is between Mr. Knightley and Emma, who eventually do
marry.

The novel, which alludes directly to A Midsummer Night's
Dream, a play also about courtship and love and all their mishaps, is centrally
concerned with the importance of the status and security of marriage to a woman in this society.
As the above examples show, almost the entire plot of the novel revolves around matchmaking,
courtship, and marriage.