Small Paperback, Fair Condition, Previous Owner's Markings, 1985, 480 pages, ISBN 0 14 043010 5

Emma – Jane Austen

In planning Emma, which appeared in 1816, Jane Austen wrote: I’m going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will like much.

Yet, despite her manifest faults – her officiousness and her capacity for deluding herself – most readers will agree liking Emma Woodhouse very much indeed. More complex and fully rounded than almost any of Jane Austen’s other characters, she dominates the novel as she believed herself to dominate her little world of Highbury. Her progress, through the mismanagement of other people’s affairs to the crisis and resolution of her own, is a whole comedy of self-deceit and self-discovery.