At twenty, Emma Woodhouse—“handsome, clever, and rich”—knows that she’s the most fantastic woman in Highbury, and nothing amuses her more than meddling in other people’s affairs. But although she has good intentions, her matchmaking goes seriously awry, wrecking a perfectly good engagement for her friend Harriet. Only after a spate of social disasters does Emma realize both her own failings and her lover for her dashing neighbor. Always courteous to the reader, toward her characters Austen shows a sympathy that remains fond even when she is exposing their foolishness, a task from which she never shies.
Emma is one of English literature’s most sparkling comedies of manners, and one of the most telling depictions we have of the limits of charm and the shock of self-recognition.
Sometimes you want to shake Emma, but ultimately, she is not impervious to correction and recognition of her faults; Jane Austen has a way of making you identify with her characters, as, for instance, Miss Bates, who talks too much and knows she talks too much, and Emma, who thoughtlessly teases Miss Bates for talking too much.
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