Emma

Emma Woodhouse — “handsome, clever, and rich” — has nothing much to do in the village of Highbury except arrange other people’s lives, beginning with her new friend Harriet Smith. Jane Austen said she was creating a heroine “whom no one but myself will much like”; readers have disagreed for two centuries.

Published in December 1815 (dated 1816), Emma is the longest and, many think, the most perfectly made of Austen’s novels: a comedy of misreading in which almost every character, and the reader, is deceived at some point, and in which the narration itself is the instrument of the deception.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text in its three volumes.