Emma - Softcover

Austen, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451526279 ISBN 13: 9780451526274

Publisher: Penguin, 1996

Synopsis

A timeless coming-of-age story follows the adventures of the self-assured and accomplished Emma, a twenty-one-year-old girl of privilege who believes she is immune to romance and has several chaotic and often humorous experiences. Reissue.

About this title

Review

"I should like to see Emma in love, and in some doubt of return; it would do her good," remarks one of Jane Austen's characters in Emma.

Quick-witted, beautiful, headstrong and rich, Emma Woodhouse is inordinately fond of match-making select inhabitants of the village of Highbury, yet aloof and oblivious as to the question of whom she herself might marry. This paradox multiplies the intrigues and sparkling ironies of Jane Austen's masterpiece, her comedy of a sentimental education through which Emma discovers a capacity for love and marriage.

Review

"Whatever age you are, Austen has something for you. I would go further, in fact, to assert that a reader never comes away from an Austen novel empty-handed" (Joanna Trollope)

"That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements of feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with" (Sir Walter Scott)

"I'd like to write a play as perfect as Emma" (Simon Gray)

"Austen's characters are unquestionably one key to her greatness. Her understanding of the human heart is forensic and also frosted with the necessary detachment that gives deeper meaning to her rendering of human frailty" (Guardian)

"It is the cleverest of books. I especially love the dialogue - every speech reveals the characters' obsessions and preoccupations, yet it remains perfectly natural...absolutely gripping" (Susannah Clarke)

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0451526279
• ISBN 13: 9780451526274
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 416