Friendships, sparring matches, celebrations, and consolations all happen over tea with Emma Lion in 1883 London. 

When volume 5 opens, Emma is weighing possible occupations to bring in more income, dismissing the many she could not do like being a cook or a laundress or a shop girl and instead focusing on what she’s quite adept at like leading an insurrection or standing on the corner making personal comments about passersby. But neither of those would help her pay bills. Alternatively, marrying Roland Sutherland would give her both wealth and a library, though she has no desire to be married to him.

One of the very moving scenes occurs when Emma recalls an image of tent stakes from a childhood garden party and realizes that Peirce, Hawkes, Islington, Mary, and Saffronia are the stakes in her life and that she’ll be okay–strong, taut, and anchored–as long as she has them. This moment lessens some of her financial worries. 

Islington remembers asking Emma’s father when she 10 (and he 18 or so) what he wanted out of life for his daughter. Her father said “to be wise and good and true to the beatings of her own heart and for her to be spared the extremes of society, both the very poor and the very rich.” Without a father since she was 13, Emma finds comfort in these words and gratitude toward Islington for conveying them to her. 

Volume 5 closes at the end of 1883 when she is 3 weeks away from her 21st birthday, her age of majority with rights and legal ownership of Lapis Lazuli house. It also closes with a vision of her in the future: a modest home, books and letters at her side, an open window looking into the backyard, a cat curled up nearby, and footsteps from someone who belongs there with her.

Vol 6 is quite funny, chronicling Emma’s short lived job as a personal secretary which ends with a shattered urn of dead dog ashes covering her head to toe. And it closes with Emma and Pierce bonding over Whitman… 5⭐️

Savoring the story, I’m holding off on volumes 8 and 9—at least for a short while.