Emma: A Classic Regency Comedy of Manners - Hardcover

Emma is Jane Austen's brilliant comedy of manners about intelligence, self-deception, social judgment, romance, and the dangerous confidence of a young woman who believes she understands everyone around her. Emma Woodhouse is wealthy, clever, privileged, and secure in her place at the centre of Highbury society. Convinced that she has a gift for arranging other people's lives, she turns matchmaking into a favourite occupation-only to discover that pride, vanity, affection, class, and desire are far less easily managed than she imagines.

First published in 1815, Emma is among Austen's most accomplished novels, admired for its wit, social precision, psychological subtlety, and tightly controlled irony. Around Emma move some of Austen's most memorable characters: the gentle but hypochondriacal Mr. Woodhouse, the honest and discerning Mr. Knightley, the impressionable Harriet Smith, the charming Frank Churchill, the reserved Jane Fairfax, and the gloriously talkative Miss Bates. Through them, Austen creates a world of visits, letters, gossip, courtship, misunderstanding, and moral education in which small social errors reveal large truths.

This SMK Books edition is suited to readers of classic English literature, Regency fiction, romantic comedy, women's fiction, literary fiction, and nineteenth-century novels. Elegant, funny, perceptive, and emotionally exact, Emma remains one of the great novels of character and social observation in the English language.