Product Description

Beautiful, clever, rich - and single - Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr Knightley and attempts to arrange a suitable match for her protégée Harriet Smith, her carefully laid plans soon unravel and have consequences that she never expected. With its imperfect but charming heroine and its witty and subtle exploration of relationships, Emma is often seen as Jane Austen's most flawless work.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22844 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-25
• Format: Unabridged
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

About the Author
Jane Austen (1775-1817) was modest about her own genius but is one of English literature's greatest and most admired writers. She is the author of Sense & Sensibility, Pride & Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion.

Customer Reviews

Excellent
This is a diamond of a novel. The language is excellent, the surroundings fitting and the characters whole. This is the sort of 'classic' that all can read, and although Austens upper-class values do grate in places it is interesting to see how a once powerful breed dominated the country.

"I seem to have been doomed to blindness."
Emma Woodhouse, "handsome, clever, and rich," is the 21-year-old daughter of the elderly owner of Hartfield, the largest estate in Highbury. Though only a couple of hours away from London by carriage, Highbury regards itself as an isolated and virtually self-contained community, with the Woodhouse family the center of social life and at the top of its social ladder. Emma, doting on her hypochondriac father, whom she represents to the outside world, has grown up without a mother's softening influence, and at twenty-one, she is bright, willful, and not a little spoiled. Having too little to do to keep out of trouble, Emma's hobby is matchmaking, "the greatest amusement in the world,." Unfortunately, her sophistication in the social graces does not extend to much insight into human beings.

Taking Harriet Smith, a young woman of "questionable birth" under her wing, Emma makes Harriet her "project," educating her in the social graces, convincing Harriet not to marry farmer Robert Martin, who has courted her, and ultimately persuading Harriet, wrongly, that the vicar, Mr. Elton, is falling in love with her. Bored and without a large circle of "suitable" friends, Emma is an incorrigible meddler, playing with the lives of those around her, snubbing those she considers inferior, gossiping about others in an attempt to divert attention to herself, and misreading intentions. Only Mr. Knightly, sixteen years older than Emma and a friend of her father, stands up to Emma and tells her what he thinks of her behavior, and it is through him that she eventually begins to grow.

Love and the formal protocol or marriage are a major focus here, with marriage more often a merger of "appropriate" families than the result of romance or passion. Class distinctions, acknowledged by all levels of society, limit both personal friendships and romantic possibilities, and as Emma's matchmaking fails again and again, causing grief to many of her victims, Emma begins to recognize that her pride, willfulness, and love of power over others have made her oblivious to her own faults. Austen shines in her depiction of Emma and her upperclass friends, gently satirizing their weaknesses but leaving room for them to learn from their mistakes--if only they can learn to recognize the ironies in their lives. Though Emma may be, in some ways, Austen's least charming heroine, she is certainly vibrant and, with her annoying faults, a most realistic one. Mary Whipple

Delightful, accomplished, witty, deviously good
Emma is the most accomplished and arguably the best of Jane Austen's novels. also, it is the most subtle. While one cannot approve of Emma's actions one can hardly escape liking her in spite of herself. As a story, it is charming, witty and intelligent, as a piece of art it is perfect. Naturally biased as I am by my enjoyment of it, this book is highly entertaining and wonderfully revealing about it's time and setting at once.Emma is social satire and entertaining storytelling at it's best and most perfect symbiosis.A must-read for any fan of old English literature.Since Jane Austen was the master of the romantic satire, this her most characteristic work is another example of the overcoming of the seeming oxymoron Romance-Satire. Ridiculing literary cliché though never to the extent of rendering her own art absurd, she takes very unromantic people and makes them susceptible to the imaginations of Romanticist Emma, who, through her delusions, brings all sorts of chaos into the tranquil neighbourhood before eventually falling prey to her own notions and foolishness in getting the man she wants through his supposed love for another. Nonwithstanding Emma's meddlings the novel ends well and everyone ends up where he or she is supposed to be, including herself. Though I am warning those who need great passion, gothic events and grand drama, read Charlotte Bronte, for here you find only, romantic comedy.