Emma Book

'I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like,' wrote Jane Austen in planning Emma (1816). Yet few readers have failed to enjoy the ironies of Emma's high-handed vanity, or to warm to her liveliness and wit. While she devotes her formidable energies to matchmaking between friends and acquaintances in the village of Highbury, the plot turns on a romance of which she is wholly unaware. Her own falling in love delights readers who have been anticipating it as profoundly as it perplexes Emma, who has not. 'Of all great writers, she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness,' wrote Virginia Woolf of Jane Austen. This is never more true than in Emma, as Fiona Stafford discusses in her introduction to this new Penguin Classics edition.