A quick Gutenberg skim on my part showed no days-of-week directly linked to days-of-month in the text, such as seen in P&P or Mansfield. Jo Modert, whose work I do not have direct access to, says that the main events of Emma seem to be mapped to an almanac for 1814-1815. Ellen Moody, after citing Modert, maps the novel instead to 1813-1814, for reasons that are not obvious to me. The only cultural reference known to point to anything earlier is Miss Bates getting confused about whether Ireland counts as a separate kingdom or not. Miss Bates is both ditzy and insular, so her continuing to get confused on this point long after it was a topical issue is plausible. Thus, this cultural reference doesn’t really wed Emma to a particular timeframe the way the soldiers billeted upon Meryton does with P&P. For once, I’m accepting Moody’s calendar without modifications. Mostly because I really don’t care that much about this novel, which weds considerable brilliance of technique, mood and psychology to two fairly unpleasant heroines, manipulative Emma Woodhouse and self-martyring Jane Fairfax. The only female characters in this one that I am at all fond of are Miss Bates and Harriet Smith.

-The elder Knightleys married sometime prior to 1776-1777, the timeframe of the birth of their elder son, George. We can safely assume that Old Mr. Knightley was also a George, and probably had the same sense of responsibility towards his tenants and his community that we see in his son, Emma’s George Knightley. Donwell Abbey would have passed into the hands of some royal cronies or other at the time of Henry VIII. To me, the Knightleys feel more like the kind of sensible gentry who would have purchased the Abbey estate after the wastrels with actual titles and connections had run the property into the ground. (All this would have happened, if it happened at all, many generations before Emma takes place.) We don’t know anything about Old Mrs. Knightley, not even her first name, unless Emma Woodhouse (and by extension her little niece Emma Knightley) are named for her. We can possibly imagine a lively, intelligent woman who befriended Mrs. Woodhouse when the Woodhouses married. She gave her elder son George high ideals of what a woman ought to be, but was perhaps unwell when her younger son John was at an impressionable age, contributing towards him becoming the kind of person who would show kindness towards fragile, anxious Isabella Woodhouse.

-Emma Woodhouse is twenty-one in the present-day of the novel, and her sister Isabella is somewhat implied to be seven years older, since George Knightley compares Emma’s intelligence at age ten with Isabella’s at age seventeen. If Isabella is twenty-eight in the present day of the novel, then her parents married around 1784-1785 at the latest. The Woodhouses were the cadet line of a very old family, and had been at Hartwell (a mere “notch” in the Donwell estate) for “several generations.” It is possible, but not necessary, to imagine them as a cadet line of the family who held Donwell Abbey before the Knightleys hypothetically purchased it. In this case, Hartwell was some kind of hand-off from one of the “wastrels with titles” to a favored younger son. More likely, Hartwell was sold off separately from, and earlier than, the main estate, in Donwell’s “wastrels with titles” phase, and passed through a couple sets of hands before it was purchased by the Woodhouses, a minimum of two and a maximum of four or five generations before Mr. Woodhouse’s time.

–We do not know the late Mrs. Woodhouse’s maiden name. She was most likely an Isabella or Isabelle like her elder daughter. She’s been dead around nine years, since Emma became mistress of the house at age twelve. George Knightley says of Mrs. Woodhouse that “Emma inherited her gifts” and “must have been subject to her.” In other words, Mrs. Woodhouse was a prodigy who could pick up art, music, etc very quickly, like Emma can, but had a more disciplined personality. Which leads us to one of the burning questions about the backstory of Emma: why on earth would such a prodigy marry Mr. Woodhouse?

–We are told that Mr. Woodhouse had not married early, and was always a valetudinarian (read: “anxious about his health but not necessarily wrong to be that way”). He had a friendly heart and an amiable temper but “his talents could not have recommended him at any time.”

–There is a theory claiming that he is a dirty old man, based on him mentioning a riddle that sounds uncharacteristically raunchy to modern minds, but which seems to have been viewed as PG-rated and suitable for young women at the time the novel was written. I incline to the opinion that the riddle and its apparent acceptability may tell us something about Austen’s world as a whole, but it doesn’t really tell us much about Mr. Woodhouse himself.

–Austen supposedly told her family that Mr. Woodhouse only lived for about a year after Emma married Knightley, which suggests either a fairly old or legitimately very unwell man. His own father perhaps died relatively young of a sudden illness, which the son also caught but survived, leaving the lady of the house and the servants to become obsessively protective of “Young Master Woodhouse.” The hero of Georgette Heyer’s The Foundling is a lot richer and smarter than Mr. Woodhouse, but imagine the kind of obsessive concern that the servants show there, applied to a moderately wealthy, good-natured but kind of dim-witted young man, one with genuine health problems.

–This tells us why he is the way he is, but not what any woman would see in him. I see three possible alternatives:

—Mr. Woodhouse was a fairly good-looking guy in his prime. There was a narrow window somewhere in his late twenties to late thirties, where he was in comparatively good mental and physical health, was actually socializing with people in a somewhat normal way, and those factors combined with his wealth, courtesy, and good humor resulted in him landing a woman who was far, far out of his league intellectually.

—The future Mrs. Woodhouse had basically Charlotte Lucas’s outlook towards marriage. She was too intelligent and strong-willed to please most of the men in her area, only marrying in her late twenties when she found a pleasant, rather foolish rich man some years older than herself, who would not dominate her. She made her children and her hobbies her life, until she died.

—The future Mrs. Woodhouse was fond of her husband, but saw him rather the way Emma saw Harriet Smith: as a pet and a project. With her running his life, he ate normal foods, traveled from home occasionally, socialized outside his own household, and was generally much less of a weirdo than he is in the present day of the novel. The shell of a man we meet in the book is what was left behind after his wife’s death.

I am enough of a sentimentalist to where I prefer a combination of the first and third options, but you do you.