Emma

Emma Woodhouse is handsome, clever, rich, and quite certain she knows what everyone else should want. Austen said she was taking on a heroine whom no one but herself would much like, and then wrote the funniest of her novels around her — a comedy in which every piece of matchmaking misfires because the matchmaker cannot read her own heart. The plot is a puzzle: every clue is on the page, and almost no reader spots them. Ninety-nine plates of painting, from Jan Steen to Thomas Lawrence, show the faces, letters, and interiors of the world Austen's matchmaker misreads.