Emma (Macmillan Collector's Library)

Austen, Jane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1909621668 ISBN 13: 9781909621664

Publisher: Macmillan Collector's Library, 2016

Oft-copied but never bettered, Jane Austen's Emma is a remarkable comedy of manners.

Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is illustrated by the celebrated Hugh Thomson and includes an afterword by David Pinching.

Austen follows the charming but insensitive Emma Woodhouse as she sets out on an ill-fated career of match-making in the little town of Highbury. Taking the pretty but dreary Harriet Smith as her subject, Emma creates misunderstandings and chaos as she tries to find Harriet a suitor, until she begins to realize it isn't the lives of others she must try to transform.

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:

It's provincial, opaque, sparkling and wonderfully optimistic while being at the same time tinged with intimations of sorrow and mortality. (Robert McCrum, ‘The 100 best novels' The Guardian)

Emma’s brilliance―its enduring status as a masterpiece of fiction―is that it puts us in the position of the less-clever-than-she-thinks-she-is heroine (Devoney Looser Literary Hub)

Emma seems to know more about our hearts that we ever do, no matter how old or experienced we may think we are. (Luke McGrath Huffpost)