Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human…

The sentence is the narrator’s, in the chapter of Emma where Mr Knightley proposes. He has hurried back from London on hearing of Frank Churchill’s secret engagement, anxious to see how Emma bears it, believing her in love with Frank. In the shrubbery at Hartfield, she assures him she never cared for Frank; he begins to speak of something else, and she stops him, fearing a confession about Harriet, then proposes another turn and lets him go on. “What did she say?—Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does.”

Austen then steps forward with this reflection: here the conduct is mistaken but the feelings are not, so it may not much matter. Knightley, the narrator adds, had been “wholly unsuspicious of his own influence”, and “the rest had been the work of the moment”.

Emma was published in December 1815 and dedicated to the Prince Regent. The sentence is often quoted alone, as a mild, knowing remark on the small disguises in everything we tell each other.

Emma, volume III, chapter 13, 1815

Checked word for word in the work itself.

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