Emma Woodhouse has it all. A grand house, a devoted father, and an unshakeable belief that she knows exactly what is best for everyone around her.
She is wrong. Spectacularly, repeatedly, and often at someone else's expense.
Jane Austen published Emma in 1815, drawing on a world she knew from the inside: the sharp social arithmetic of English country life, where a single misstep in a drawing room could undo years of careful reputation, and where the cleverest person in the room was often the last to see what was really going on. Austen saw all of it. She put all of it on the page.
In the village of Highbury, Emma decides to find a husband for Harriet Smith, a sweet girl of uncertain birth whom she has taken under her wing. The plan seems simple. It is anything but. What unfolds is a comedy of spectacular miscalculation — proposals misread, affections invented, and a young farmer dismissed far too quickly — until Emma is forced to confront something far more uncomfortable than any social blunder: herself.
Emma is sharp, funny, and completely gripping. It is the novel that invented the unreliable narrator two centuries before anyone had a name for it.
This edition presents Emma in modern English, without losing any of Austen's precision.
Two hundred years old. Not a single page is boring.
HISTORICA
Great Stories, Rediscovered
