Emma book club

In the 90s there was a Jane Austen Renaissance, or that’s what it felt like. There were so many great Jane Austen adaptations, and towards the end of it there was an Emma movie, and then there was the Clueless movie which is essentially Emma set in the 90s. Ahhh, what a good time to be alive. Fast forward a decade or two, and I’m homeschooling my kids and I assigned an Emma book club as part of our ever-growing book and a movie collection. I have this listed in 11th-grade books and movies, but you could easily read it earlier. Why homeschool if you’re not going to force your kids to read books you love?

I ask only partially in jest.

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Emma book

Somewhere I read Jane Austen tried to make a heroine that you wouldn’t like when she designed Emma. Emma is somewhat self-centered, she can be a bit mean, and she’s more than a bit clueless (hence how you get the 90s adaptation Clueless).

But, she also has some interesting ideas, because she is less perfect than Austen’s other heroines she has some growth she needs to do.

She’s not my favorite of Austen’s heroines, but I find her amusing.

Emma book club

I bought an Emma book club from TpT, and I have very mixed feelings about it. The questions specifically for each chapter are decent, but then there are generic essay prompts that don’t feel like they had anything to do with the book.

Wait, I found a book club I can promote! I love Hide the Chocolate’s book clubs, so I’m going to recommend that.

Let me do a quick check to see if I can find any other ideas:

• Emma discussion questions
• More Emma questions
• Questions kind of by chapter
• Final bit of Emma questions

Options for an Emma movie night after reading the book

I just realized I should probably let you know about your options:

Literal adaptations of Emma

I follow a lot of historical costuming people, and you will not be surprised to know people have OPINIONS on these movies.

My favorite: Emma 2020, the costumes are SPOT on, they actually have a couple of costumes/scenes that are recreations of fashion plates from the time. If you ever have the joy/misfortune to watch this with me, I can tell you which scenes.

• Emma 1996– I don’t know if Gwyneth Paltrow really got the character, but is also probably why I think Knightley should be dark haired
• Emma 1997– overshadowed by the more well known 1996 Emma, I’ve heard Kate Beckinsale plays Emma better than Gwyneth Paltrow
• BBC Emma 2009– from what I’ve heard people are split on whether they prefer the 2009 or the below 70s Emma version
• BBC Emma 1970s– BBC in the 1970s is the epitome of bootstrap

Now heading over to adaptations where you change the time period to “now.”

Vague adaptations of Emma

Everyone knows about Clueless, it’s probably the most well-known.

After Pemberley digital was successful with Pride and Prejudice they made a webseries for Emma, which also worked really well (Little Women, did not).

I should rewatch the series again at some point.

I know there are more versions of the Emma movie, but I can’t remember them.

Get your own labels and bookmarks

You can get your own labels for your Emma book club snacks, and a coupon to get a complete set of the book and a movie bookmarks for free in the welcome series when you join my newsletter.

Emma book club and movie night snacks

After having read/watched several Jane Austen adaptations, I tried to create some unique snacks, but you could easily use the snacks from our other Jane Austen movie nights:

• Pride and Prejudice movie night
• Sense and Sensibility movie night
• Austenland book club– not a Jane Austen book, but inspired by her books

Looking over the snacks we must have read it just as the charcuterie trend became big.

• charcuterie- random meat and cheese cuts arranged to look pretty, yep, that’s it
• croissant
• tea cookies- I think I picked up some Russian tea cookies, maybe? Or maybe these were Mexican wedding cakes, or maybe an Italian Christmas cookie? I don’t know, they seem like it’s from something like that
• crumpets- from the recipe in our Mary Poppins book club
• portrait- since Emma takes several portraits, we used Chessmen cookies
• scones- using our favorite scone recipe
• carriage- we used simple Ritz crackers, though I could have made the pumpkin carriages from Ella Enchanted book club
• pastels- were the pirouette cookies, which vaguely look like pastel pencils or paint brushes depending on the type of pastel
• punch- we had apple cider I believe

And that’s it, that was our snacks for our Emma book club. Nice and simple.

Find the links to my other posts

All throughout this post I’ve got links to my other posts sprinkled, can you find them?

“Emma av Jane Austen” by cwasteson is licensed under CC BY 2.0.