Now we review a show with a bit of culture as we dive into Victorian Romance Emma.

The show is about title character Emma who works as a maid for a Governess who ends up falling in love with a member of the Gentry named William Jones, the son of a wealthy merchant family, however class lines are drawn and fate tries to drive the two lovers apart, will their love cross the borders of the social class?
Without sounding like a cheesy narrator, this show is an honest historical romance story that tells it as it is; it never gets too strange or surreal nor does it get really dramatic; writer Kaoru Mori, a self proclaimed Anglophile, went to great lengths to recreate 1895 London in it's purest form and insisted on not tainting it with anything from the realms of steampunk or the dark undergrounds of horror, it's just a love story and that's all you get, and that's okay if you enjoy that sort of thing; I went into this anime thinking about trying something different and coming out of it reminded me why I hate novels like Pride and Prejudice. It's pace is so slow that one episode feels as long as a movie and when you realize you got 23 more episodes it becomes a real chore to finish. There's nothing really wrong with the story and keeping the setting grounded into the realms of realism gives it a unique edge against other anime, backed up well by the beautiful art style and music
But there is one fault that isn't the fault of the anime itself but rather the Western distributors; it doesn't have an English dub and with it being set in London, it really needed it for immersion; the Japanese speech is distracting and doesn't work in this setting.
You see a dub works when the setting is a Western country like the States or Great Britain, it doesn't work when said show is spoken in Japanese because it's not only distracting but also discredits the work especially with the amount of effort that was put into making Emma purely Victorian Britain. It's the same in reverse as well, you can't dub into English an anime that relies on Japanese culture and mannerisms to tell it's story, a good example being Azumanga Daioh.
Final Verdict: I'd recommend Emma if you enjoy historical romance dramas and have read Jane Austen books. You'll lose some immersion with it being subbed only but if you're okay with that then it shouldn't distract you too much.