Definition of "Emma"

Both Saxon and Norman chroniclers unite in representing the youthful Queen Emma as in a peculiar degree gifted with elegance and beauty; so that many flattering epithets had been bestowed on her - as "the Pearl," "the Flower," or "the Fair Maid" of Normandy.

1854, Matthew Hall, The Queens Before the Conquest, pages 259–260

Emma Calvé...since Madame Bovary the name Emma suggests a solid bourgeois foundation, a country family...Emma Eames, a chilly name...a wind from the East.

1917, Carl Van Vechten, Interpreters and Interpretations., A.A.Knopf, page 92

The cottage now belonged to Emma's mother Beatrix, who was a tutor in English literature at a women's college, specialising in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel. This may have accounted for Emma's Christian name, for it had seemed to Beatrix unfair to call her daughter Emily, a name associated with her grandmother's servants rather than the author of The Wuthering Heights, so Emma had been chosen, perhaps with the hope that some of the qualities possessed by the heroine of the novel might be perpetuated.

1980, Barbara Pym, A Few Green Leaves, page 8