Emma

A comic novel set in one village, built around a heroine who is wrong about almost everyone. The pace is slow and the sentences are long, but the dialogue and the second-guessing are the fun, and the ending lands. Four and a half out of five (draft). Read it if: you like comedies of manners built on misunderstandings; you enjoy a heroine who is clever, sure of herself and often wrong; you want a story where nearly all the action is conversation. Skip it if: you want a fast plot: almost nothing happens outside drawing rooms and walks; long, formal sentences wear you out; you need every character to be likable from page one.

Our ending explained covers the final chapters in full, with spoilers. Emma ending explained: who Emma marries, who Harriet marries, Frank and Jane's secret engagement and how Mr. Woodhouse finally agrees. Full spoilers. Emma Ending Explained →

Emma summary by Jane Austen: every match Emma tries to make, scored, from Harriet and the vicar to the secret under everyone's nose. Full spoilers. Emma Summary: Every Match Emma Makes, Scored →

Emma Woodhouse is a handsome, clever and rich young woman who runs her father's house in the village of Highbury. Pleased with herself for making one match, she takes up a new friend, Harriet Smith, as a project, and the novel follows what happens when she tries to arrange other people's lives.

The Project Gutenberg text (ebook number 158) has 55 chapters in three volumes. By our count that is about 157,000 words: roughly 48,500 in volume one, 52,900 in volume two and 56,100 in volume three.

In and around Highbury, a village in Surrey (spelled Surry in the text). The main houses are Hartfield, where Emma lives, Randalls, home of the Westons, and Donwell Abbey, Mr. Knightley's estate.

No. Emma is a self-contained story, so you can read it first, and nothing in it depends on her other books.

Emma is on Project Gutenberg as ebook number 158, released there on August 1, 1994.