Emma

Characters in Emma by Jane Austen have many prejudices that Austen challenges the reader to find rather than state them. Set in the fictional country village of Highbury, the novel involves the relationships among people from a small number of families.

Emma was first published in December 1815, although the title page is dated 1816. As in her other novels, Austen explores the concerns and difficulties of genteel women living in Georgian–Regency England. Emma is a comedy of manners.

"I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like," Austen wrote before she began the novel. In the first sentence, she introduces the title character as "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition… had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her."

Headstrong, Emma is spoiled and self-satisfied. She greatly overestimates her matchmaking abilities. Emma is blind to the dangers of meddling in other people's lives; and her imagination and perceptions often lead her astray.

I read Emma by Jane Austen at university and saw the movie (two versions). And needed Wikipedia to refresh the memory for the summary above. Isn't there a Mr Bingley? Nope, he was in Pride and Prejudice.

The names in some of these novels are fun. Mr. Humphrey Cadwallader in Middlemarch always gets a chuckle, but his wife takes the cake. Dickensian names... don't get me started. Chuzzlewit! Pecksniff!

Many authors (Conrad, Wells, DH Lawrence, Nabokov, etc.) disliked Emma by Jane Austen or didn't see how or why it was important, but Samuel Beckett found it to be a delight. Go figure.