Young, well-off and spoiled, Emma Woodhouse is complacently convinced that she knows what is best for everyone, particularly in matters of the heart. Her matchmaking skills are largely directed towards her young, amiable and innocent protegée Harriet Smith, whom Emma decides would be ideally matched with the clergyman, Mr Elton. 

Elton, however, has other ideas and, despising Harriet for her lack of social status, he has his eye on Emma herself. Emma plays with the idea of being in love with Frank Churchill, recently arrived as a visitor in her village, but her real, unrecognized feelings are for the sympathetic and warm-hearted local squire, George Knightley who watches her attempts to shape other people’s lives with a mixture of affection and irritation.

As Emma’s assorted schemes collapse in embarrassment and, occasionally, distress, she is forced to acknowledge that she knows less about herself and about other people than she once believed she did.
‘Three or four families in a country village,’ Jane Austen wrote in a letter to one of her relatives, ‘is the very thing to work on.’ It was the world which she knew intimately herself. Born in a Hampshire village where her father was rector, she spent most of her life in the midst of her family either there or at Chawton, another village in Hampshire, or at Bath. Although she had several suitors, she never married. She died of Addison’s disease in Winchester at the age of only 41. All this might suggest that, as a novelist, she worked on a restricted canvas. Emma, as much as any of her novels, shows that there is far more to Jane Austen than the image of a rural spinster implies. Her tough-minded realism about human motivation and self-deceit, about the manoeuvrings of the marriage market and the institution of the family give her works a sharpness and a truthfulness all their own.

Film versions: Emma (starring Gwyneth Paltrow as Emma, 1996); Clueless (a version of the story updated to 1990s Beverley Hills, 1995)

Read on
Mansfield Park; Persuasion
Joan Aiken, Mansfield Revisited; Barbara Pym, Excellent Women