Ed's right

Oh, I see.

Yes, Emma gets praise but no spondulicks, apart from being bailed out by her parents and (like Helen) having their house to live in. That Helen does not deserve to be pandered to does not mean that Emma deserves to be, though. Neither of them does.

Emma spent best part of five years hunting down the man she has ended up married to, so I can’t help feeling that she really has nobody to thank or blame for her present position, ie treated as one of his family by his male ancestors, but herself.

And I am really sorry, but the mistakes made when twenty can indeed come back to haunt someone five and ten years later; that doesn’t make Emma’s behaviour then any less nasty, and when she married Will whilst believing that she was carrying his brother’s child she was not sweet sixteen and never been kissed, she was twenty-one and had already had sex with his brother on at least one occasion before the one which she erroneously believed had knocked her up. She most definitely made her own bed, and if lying in it is not what she had hoped for in her life, well, that was why she chucked Ed over and stayed with Will, wasn’t it? She didn’t want to descend to Ed’s level. Now she has. And she did it to herself just as much as Helen did; each insisted on choosing a crumby life-partner.

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I can agree nearly with all you say, indeed agree that Emma is a very flawed individual, I know she can be sulky and peevish, yet I still think Helen is by far the more privileged and at the same time very much the nastier of the two and by far the more ungrateful. As for pandering, Emma isn’t nearly as pandered to as Helen. Bridge Farm runs around and for Helen. That simply isn’t the case for Emma.

I think she and Ed will be all right or at any rate I’d quite like them to be.

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