Emma

Reading time: about 11.5 h
Length: 160,404 words · 300 pages
Structure: 55 chapters
Language: English
Era: Romantic

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.

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About this edition

The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.

Part of The English Novel.

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About the author

Jane Austen

1775–1817 · Romantic

Jane Austen (1775–1817) was born at Steventon, Hampshire, the seventh of eight children of a country clergyman, and spent her life in the south of England — Steventon, Bath, Southampton and finally Chawton, where she revised and wrote the six novels on which her reputation rests: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), and, posthumously, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1817). All were published anonymously in her lifetime. She died at Winchester at forty-one.

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