Emma

Introduction by A. Walton Litz

'Emma Woodhouse handsome clever and rich with a comfortable home and happy disposition seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.' So begins Jane Austen's comic masterpiece Emma. In Emma Austen's prose brilliantly elevates in the words of Virginia Woolf 'the trivialities of day-to-day existence of parties picnics and country dances' of early-nineteenth-century life in the English countryside to an unrivaled level of pleasure for the reader. At the center of this world is the inimitable Emma Woodhouse a self-proclaimed matchmaker who by the novel's conclusion may just find herself the victim of her own best intentions.