Emma (Penguin Classics)

Author: Jane Austen

Emma is young, rich and independent. She has decided not to get married and instead spends her time organizing her acquaintances’ love affairs.  Her plans for the matrimonial success of her new friend Harriet, however, leads her into complications that ultimately test her own detachment from the world of romance.

"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.. In Emma, Jane Austen shows us the halting development of an adolescent girl from perky narcissism to something approaching empathy"

Guardian