Emma

Emma Woodhouse is handsome, clever, and rich — and quite sure she knows what is best for everyone around her. Mistress of her father's house at the age of twenty, with no one to check her, she takes up matchmaking as a hobby, adopting the pretty, illegitimate Harriet Smith as a project and steering her away from the man who loves her toward suitors entirely above her station. Nothing turns out as Emma plans, because Emma reads the people of Highbury as characters in a story she is composing, never as they really are.

Around her move the charming, evasive Frank Churchill; the reserved and accomplished Jane Fairfax; the harmless, endlessly talking Miss Bates; and Mr. Knightley, the one person willing to tell Emma the truth about herself. Beneath the matchmaking runs a concealed engagement whose clues lie in plain sight — and which the reader, looking through Emma's eyes, is expertly invited to miss.

Told in the free indirect style Austen brought here to perfection, Emma makes us share its heroine's confident misjudgments until the moment they collapse. Its true crisis is not romantic but moral: a thoughtless cruelty to poor Miss Bates on Box Hill, and the rebuke that follows, force a clever woman to feel for the first time the harm that cleverness without kindness can do.

Austen set out, she said, to draw “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” Two centuries of readers have proved her wrong. Funny, exact, and quietly devastating, Emma is for many the most flawless of her novels and one of the great comedies of self-knowledge in English.