Emma is Jane Austen’s masterpiece and one of the
supreme achievements of English fiction. Its cast of
characters includes some of the author’s most fully
realized creations, including the upstanding Mr
Knightley, the egregious Mrs Elton and the
irrepressibly garrulous Miss Bates. But Emma is
dominated above all by the personality of its
heroine, Emma Woodhouse, Austen’s portrayal of
whom – a masterclass in irony and the management
of narrative perspective – is one of the great high-
wire acts of English literature. Among the most
variously interpreted novels in the language, Emma
has been seen as a cautionary tale about the
dangers of unregulated imagination, the story of a
woman’s humiliation and reform, and a rallying cry
of early feminism. This e-book seeks to uncover
something of Emma’s extraordinary multivalence
through a close reading of the text, setting it in the
context of Jane Austen’s life, times and literary
heritage and looking at the way it has been read and
re-read by critics in the two centuries since it was
published.
