Jane Austen: 'Emma‪'‬

Emma is Jane Austen’s masterpiece and one of the

supreme achievements of English fiction. Its cast of

characters includes some of the author’s most fully

realized creations, including the upstanding Mr

Knightley, the egregious Mrs Elton and the

irrepressibly garrulous Miss Bates. But Emma is

dominated above all by the personality of its

heroine, Emma Woodhouse, Austen’s portrayal of

whom – a masterclass in irony and the management



of narrative perspective – is one of the great high-

wire acts of English literature. Among the most



variously interpreted novels in the language, Emma

has been seen as a cautionary tale about the

dangers of unregulated imagination, the story of a

woman’s humiliation and reform, and a rallying cry

of early feminism. This e-book seeks to uncover

something of Emma’s extraordinary multivalence

through a close reading of the text, setting it in the

context of Jane Austen’s life, times and literary

heritage and looking at the way it has been read and

re-read by critics in the two centuries since it was

published.