Emma Woodhouse is a wealthy, exquisite, and thoroughly self-deluded young woman who has "lived in the world with very little to distress or vex her."

Jane Austen exercises her taste for cutting social observation and her talent for investing seemingly trivial events with profound moral significance as Emma traverses a gentle satire of provincial balls and drawing rooms, along the way encountering the sweet Harriet Smith, the chatty and tedious Miss Bates, and Emma￯﾿ﾽs absurd father Mr. Woodhouse￯﾿ﾽa memorable gallery of Austen￯﾿ﾽs finest personages. Thinking herself impervious to romance of any kind, Emma tries to arrange a wealthy marriage for poor Harriet, but refuses to recognize her own feelings for the gallant Mr. Knightley. What ensues is a delightful series of scheming escapades in which every social machination and bit of "tittle-tattle" is steeped in Austen￯﾿ﾽs delicious irony. Ultimately, Emma discovers that "Perfect happiness, even in memory, is not common."

Virginia Woolf called Jane Austen "the most perfect artist among women," and Emma Woodhouse is arguably her most perfect creation. Though Austen found her heroine to be a person whom "no one but myself will much like," Emma is her most cleverly woven, riotously comedic, and pleasing novel of manners.
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Introduction by Steven Marcus
The author of more than two hundred publications and a specialist in nineteenth-century literature and culture, Steven Marcus is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. A fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academy of Literary Studies, he has received Fulbright, American Council of Learned Societies, Guggenheim, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Rockefeller, and Mellon grants.

Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, the seventh of eight children, in the Parsonage House of Steventon, Hampshire. An avid reader from earliest childhood, she began writing at age twelve. Her first two extended narratives, "Elinor and Marianne" and "First Impressions," were later reworked into Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, respectively. All of Austen￯﾿ﾽs novels were published anonymously, including Mansfield Park, Emma, and the posthumous Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Jane Austen died on July 18, 1817, and is buried in Winchester Cathedral.


"Jane Austen among all our novelists is unsurpassed in pursuing arguments to logically consequent ends. It is part of her genius that such pressure often leads to comically absurd conclusions."￯﾿ﾽfrom the Introduction by Steven Marcus