Emma

About the book

Emma Woodhouse has money, social standing, and considerable confidence in her ability to understand other people. With few urgent demands on her own future, she takes an imaginative interest in arranging the happiness of those around her, especially her new friend Harriet Smith. Highbury provides a small stage of visits, parties, rumours, and carefully interpreted remarks, but Austen makes its possibilities for misunderstanding remarkably large. Readers see events close to Emma's perspective and must decide how far to share her conclusions. The comedy depends on the distance between kindly intentions and the effects of exercising influence. Under its bright social surface, the novel examines class, friendship, embarrassment, and the difficult discipline of allowing other people lives beyond the stories invented for them.

• Self-knowledge
• Friendship
• Class and influence

Why read it

For a comedy that invites you to solve social puzzles alongside a brilliantly unreliable interpreter.

English text