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As the Tallis family matriarch, Emily keeps a close watch on the social and domestic nuances of her household, believing herself to be knowledgeable about the behavior and experiences of her children, guests, and employees. Frequently victimized by migraines, Emily often retreats to her bedroom, where she lays silent and listens to the comings and goings of the household, noting the many movements and conversations of its members. Emily has a particularly affectionate relationship with her youngest child, Briony, and reveals that motherhood is the most joyful and fulfilling aspect of her life, which has otherwise been banal and unsatisfying. Although she’s skeptical of Cecilia’s feminist pretensions, Emily is undoubtedly constrained by the limitations of conservative, traditional womanhood, and has found herself inert and fatigued, locked into a monotonous routine of domestic duties. She dreads Briony’s transition into young adulthood, because without a child to care for, Emily will have to contend with her broken marriage and mundane life. Aware that her husband Jack is adulterous, Emily allows his indiscretions to pass without comment, assuming that he will eventually return to her. Emily has endured several perceived disappointments in life, which include Jack’s unfaithfulness as well as her sister Hermione’s melodramatic temperament, but seems to have made peace with the fact that she often is not the priority of her loved ones.

However, Emily does not understand the goings-on of her household as well as she believes she does, nor is she immune to the biases that corrupt her perception. While she hears Paul Marshall and Lola conversing alone in a nearby room as she recovers from a migraine, she does not hear the following scuffle that results in bruising and scratches on Lola and a large scratch on Marshall’s face. Additionally, she believes that Marshall is simply endearing himself to the children by socializing with Lola, and never questions why the two were alone together. When Emily is given another opportunity to further investigate Lola’s situation, she thinks to herself that Lola’s wounds are particularly concerning and wonders how two little boys could have caused them. However, rather than question Lola or her little brothers about the bruising and the siblings’ supposed fight, she fails to take the matter seriously and resents Lola’s dramatic emotional reaction. Emily cannot separate Lola from Lola’s mother, Hermione, who is Emily’s difficult and attention-seeking sister. Just as Briony constructs a narrative about Robbie and Cecilia that fits her own limited worldview, Emily does the same with Lola, which keeps her from seeing the truth about the rape that occurs within her own home. Emily also miscalculates the severity of her marital problems. While she believes that decorum and old age will bring Jack back home to her, Briony’s 1999 section reveals that the couple divorced, and Jack married another woman.

Emily is also the most potent representation of the old-school English classism that exacerbates Robbie’s unjust treatment. Raised in a society with a strict class hierarchy, Emily has been taught to view an individual’s class status as indicative of their values, intelligence, and morality. Although Emily is not alone in this thinking, as all the characters in Atonement are affected by class prejudices, it does explain why she quickly and vigorously believes in Robbie’s villainy and works to see him punished. In Emily’s worldview, it is natural that a lower-class man would be the guilty party in a rape. It would have been far less in accordance with her worldview to consider that an upper-class gentleman like Marshall may have been the actual culprit. Emily is a vestige of a traditional England predicated on a rigid hierarchy of class and gender that, over the course of the novel, is in the slow process of disappearing. By the end of the book, Briony notes that one can no longer tell someone’s level of education by their behavior or appearance as one could when she was a child. At this point, Emily has been dead for some time, and the old world is fading away with her.

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