There is nothing like staying at home, for real comfort.

The line is spoken by Mrs Elton in chapter 14 of the second volume of Emma, on her first visit to Hartfield after her marriage. The vicar’s new wife has been describing the barouche-landau of her brother-in-law Mr Suckling of Maple Grove and their explorations to King’s Weston “most delightfully”, and asks Miss Woodhouse whether Highbury has many such parties. Emma answers coolly that they are “a very quiet set of people”, more disposed to stay at home. Mrs Elton agrees at once: nobody can be more devoted to home than she is; she was “quite a proverb for it at Maple Grove”, where her sister Selina could never get her to move from the house.

The comedy lies in the contradiction: the woman who cannot stop talking of her carriage rides declares herself a homebody, and Emma, once alone, pronounces her insufferable.

Austen published Emma at the end of 1815, and the line, torn from its speaker, is cheerfully quoted as a genuine praise of home, which in the novel it is not.

Emma, volume II, chapter 14 (Mrs Elton), 1815

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work