Emma
Jane Austen
Emma
60 chapters·18h 3m listening
4.05from 1,019,994 ratingson Goodreads
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, has decided she will never marry and that arranging other people's marriages is the next best thing. She takes up a young woman of unknown parentage, talks her out of a good offer, and misreads every man in Highbury in turn, including the one who has been telling her the truth for twenty years.
About the book
Published in 1815, Emma follows Emma Woodhouse, a privileged young woman living with her father at Hartfield. Financially secure and convinced she has little need to marry, Emma turns her energy towards the lives of others, especially Harriet Smith, whose friendships and romantic prospects she attempts to guide. Jane Austen builds the novel around the gap between Emma’s confidence and her limited understanding of motives, class and affection. The small community of Highbury provides a dense network of visits, dinners, gossip and misunderstandings in which apparently minor social choices carry real consequences. Much of the comedy comes from learning how differently the same event can be read.
Characters
Emma Woodhouse — Protagonist
A wealthy, intelligent young woman whose confidence in reading other people often exceeds her judgement.
George Knightley — Family friend
Emma’s older friend and neighbour, respected for his judgement and unusually willing to criticise her.
Harriet Smith — Emma’s friend
A pretty and impressionable young woman whose uncertain parentage makes her social position ambiguous.
Mr Woodhouse — Emma’s father
Emma’s affectionate, anxious father, devoted to familiar routines and worried by change of every kind.
Frank Churchill — Visitor to Highbury
A charming young man whose long-awaited arrival quickly attracts curiosity throughout Highbury.
Jane Fairfax — Emma’s acquaintance
An accomplished young woman with limited means whose reserve and talents provoke Emma’s curiosity.
Miss Bates — Neighbour
A kind, talkative woman of reduced means who shares every piece of Highbury news she encounters.
About the author
Jane Austen (1775–1817) was an English novelist whose six completed books turned the ordinary business of courtship, money and family into some of the most exacting social comedy in the language. She wrote about a narrow world — the minor landed gentry of southern England — with an irony precise enough that readers still argue about where her sympathies lie. Her handling of a character's thoughts in the narrator's own voice shaped how novels have reported an inner life ever since. Her novels appeared anonymously in her lifetime, credited only to "A Lady"; they include Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Persuasion.