'I wonder what will become of her!'So speculate the friends and neighbours of Emma Woodhouse, the lovely, lively, wilful,and fallible heroine of Jane Austen's fourth published novel. Confident that she knows best, Emma schemes to find a suitable husband for her pliant friend Harriet, only to discover that she understands the feelings of others as little as she does her own heart. As Emma puzzles and blunders her way through
the mysteries of her social world, Austen evokes for her readers a cast of unforgettable characters and a detailed portrait of a small town undergoing historical transition. Written with matchless
wit and irony, judged by many to be her finest novel, Emma has been adapted many times for film and television. This new edition emphasises the novel's extraordinary technical audacity. While apparently conservative in its choice of setting and range of characters, it was - and is - a formally revolutionary work.
'I wonder what will become of her!'So speculate the friends and neighbours of Emma Woodhouse, the lovely, lively, wilful,and fallible heroine of Jane Austen's fourth published novel. Confident that she knows best, Emma schemes to find a suitable husband for her pliant friend Harriet, only to discover that she understands the feelings of others as little as she does her own heart. As Emma puzzles and blunders her way through
the mysteries of her social world, Austen evokes for her readers a cast of unforgettable characters and a detailed portrait of a small town undergoing historical transition. Written with matchless
wit and irony, judged by many to be her finest novel, Emma has been adapted many times for film and television. This new edition emphasises the novel's extraordinary technical audacity. While apparently conservative in its choice of setting and range of characters, it was - and is - a formally revolutionary work.
Introduction
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Jane Austen
EMMA
Explanatory Notes
John Mullan is Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English
Literature at University College London. He has previously edited
editions of Daniel Defoe's Roxana (2008) and Samuel Johnson's The
Lives of the Poets (2009) for Oxford World's Classics as well as
Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (2019). He is the author of The
Artful Dickens (Bloomsbury, 2020), What Matters in Jane Austen?
(Bloomsbury, 2012), Anonymity:
A Secret History of English Literature (Faber & Faber, 2008), and
How Novels Work (OUP, 2006).
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