Emma

Emma, by Jane Austen, is a novel about youthful hubris and the perils of misconstrued romance. The novel was first published in December 1815. As in her other novels, Austen explores the concerns and difficulties of genteel women living in Georgian-Regency England; she also creates a lively comedy of manners among her characters. The book is a year in the life of Emma Woodhouse, a congenial but naïve young woman who thinks of herself as a romantic matchmaker in her small community in early-19th-century England. Emma fails horribly as a matchmaker, but things ultimately end well for her and her friends. When her governess, Miss Taylor, gets married and goes to live with her new husband, Mr Weston, Emma proudly takes credit for having brought the couple together. Her father and their old family friend George Knightley dispute her claim and disapprove of her trying to make more matches, but she ignores their warnings and sets her mind on setting up Mr Elton, the minister who performed the Westons’s marriage ceremony, with Harriet Smith, an unsophisticated young woman just entering society. Emma has been the subject of many adaptations for film, TV, radio and the stage, most notably the 1996 movie, “Emma”, an American comedy starring Gwyneth Paltrow as Emma.