Name: Emma
Rating: 4.022175732217574 (1195 reviews)

Jane Austen

Sarah Darragh

This guide intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts when studying Emma by Jane Austen.

Emma

If you like drama, gossip, comedy, epic reveals, and witty writing this book might just be it for you. Emma is such a guilty pleasure to read which is not only a comedy book but also extremely cleaverly written which one realises as they read it more. The book felt so interesting and light hearted I read it in one sitting altogether. The comedy scenes making me laugh, the silly blind delusions of Emma making me wanna put sense in her, the epic reveals making me stunned, and Emma's reflections on herself making me satisfied. This book needs to be spoken about more, and is one of my favorites with utmost doubt.

Aarush Arora

New chronology and further reading; Tony Tanner's original introduction reinstated Edited with an introduction and notes by Flora Stafford.

Comfort book, I read it every few months to make myself believe that love exists for me too

sophie

M. Sosotris

I’ve read this one before, but I didn’t really properly appreciate what it was doing that first time. I keep reading these incorrectly as romance novels. And Pride and Prejudice is really the only one that feels like a contemporary romance novel. 

This one is very much more of a satirical comedy that ends in a HEA for the characters, but its magic is in the character arcs and the complex satire.

I love how it feels almost plotless for much of it, until the finale where all the little moments that have been happening here and there all click together in satisfying ways as the truth comes out.

And Emma is such a delightful protagonist. She’s flawed and complicated and seeing her reach an understanding about her own flaws makes the finale work so well.

I loved this one.

Delightful classic with twists for days but a happy ending

It took me a lot of time to get into this, but after I got an audiobook of it and used it to read it with my physical copy, I really got into it.

I enjoyed it a lot because Emma was a force of nature within the society she lived in. She is a good friend, even though she sometimes ( a lot in the book) makes mistakes that may hurt them, you know that if she is in your side, you are highly regarded by her, and she will try to protect you and give you all the best she can do it. She is a spoiled girl too, but during the book, she learns a lot to become the woman she is at the end of it.

I expected a bit more romance, I'll be honest but the amount we got, not only with Emma an Knightley, but with Harriet and Robert, and even Jane and Frank were honestly so interesting throughout the novel.

Although I believed the last part of the novel had a better pacing than the first part, it has been one of the classics I have enjoyed.

4.25 🌟

It took me a lot of time to get into this, but after I got an audiobook of it and used it to read it with my physical copy, I really got into it.
I enjoyed it a lot because Emma was a force of nature within the society she lived in. She is a good friend, even though she sometimes ( a lot in the book) makes mistakes that may hurt them, you know that if she is in your side, you are highly regarded by her, and she will try to protect you and give you all the best she can do it. She is a spoiled girl too, but during the book, she learns a lot to become the woman she is at the end of it.
I expected a bit more romance, I'll be honest but the amount we got, not only with Emma an Knightley, but with Harriet and Robert, and even Jane and Frank were honestly so interesting throughout the novel.
Although I believed the last part of the novel had a better pacing than the first part, it has been one of the classics I have enjoyed.

my girl emma is a serial self-saboteur and a perennial #assumer, but who among us is not the same at the age of 21? love herrrr and everyone we meet except the eltons. fuck the eltons.

alice

naila

The culmination of Jane Austen’s genius, a sparkling comedy of love and marriage—now in a stunning 200th-anniversary Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition Now a major motion picture starring Anya Taylor-Joy Beautiful, clever, rich—and single—Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr. Knightley and attempts to arrange a suitable match for her protégée, Harriet Smith, her carefully laid plans soon unravel and have consequences that she never expected. With its imperfect but charming heroine and its witty and subtle exploration of relationships, Emma is often seen as Jane Austen’s most flawless work. This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition celebrates two hundred years of Austen’s beloved novel. With a beautiful cover designed by illustrator Dadu Shin and comprehensive notes drawing specially from the Jane Austen Collection at Goucher College, this is an edition to be treasured by students and collectors alike. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

200th-Anniversary Annotated Edition (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Hilarious, when has a female character thrived like this 

Kavitha Ramachandran 

liked it more than pride and prejudice solely because the characters are funnier and more likable. Emma is THE girl, her character arc is amazing, sensible, relatable, though she made mistakes at times but she always was fully aware of it. and she grew so much from her mistakes, love her. Mr.Knightly could be more present in the story, it annoyed me that he was just starting to become more significant towards the end. Descriptions of him and Emma being close was not that convincing since they interacted so little throughout the book. Not the most charming character. The rest of them were decent, funny, but i couldn't remember any of their names and who they were except for the main three couples. Overall a very slow book. Romance started quite late. But other than that it's an entertaining series of events. People come and go and talked and danced. Almost mundane, which is to be expected, but guess there weren't much to do back then except gossiping and talking about your own feelings.

Fiona Stafford

Content with her life and not interested in marriage, Emma Woodhouse, a rich and beautiful heiress, causes complications with her matchmaking schemes.

Anna 

RIP emma you would've loved being chronically online and watching emma chamberlain

Brittnee Coffmen

Emma (Classic Fiction)

I love Jane Austen's writing, she was witty and ahead of her time. I think the story, while listening on audiobook, can get a little long-winded. But generally, Austen includes a lot of detail in her writing. 

I actually haven't seen or read anything about Emma before, so this was totally new to me and I'm pleasantly surprised! 

Paige Leitner

I listened to this as an audiobook! 

I love Jane Austen's writing, she was witty and ahead of her time. I think the story, while listening on audiobook, can get a little long-winded. But generally, Austen includes a lot of detail in her writing. 

I actually haven't seen or read anything about Emma before, so this was totally new to me and I'm pleasantly surprised! 

Ronald Blythe

Emma (Penguin Classics)

Demon

** spoiler alert **
           Follow Emma through her journey to find a husband to Harriet, her friend! Emma will also give us her view upon marriage, letting us dive into questioning on friendship, relationship and neighborhood relations. Will Emma find her own place? 
I really enjoyed reading this book. It was honestly my first Jane Austen’s book so I wasn’t familiar with her writing. I had questions all along the book and still had questions at the end but I think that it is good. The book and Jane Austen’s writing give us the opportunity to think about marriage during Austen’s time and also today. It also gives us the opportunity to think about friendship (between men and women, women and women, men and men), family dynamics (death of Emma’s mother, the place of her father, her own place in her family for example), the place in society (the example of Harriet but also Miss Taylor, a governor marrying a man and so changing her status) but also relation with the neighborhood (how people saw Frank Churchill at first, the first impression on Jane). I really love how the book deals with a lot of different things and even if it is from a romantic author, I think it can be seen as realistic. Some struggles the characters encounter, in their own period of time, can be a mirror of our own struggles in our own society. It is as if the book is intemporal even though the setting is not the same as our current period and society. 
I had some hard moments with different characters and I didn’t understand them all (I still don’t understand why Jane and Frank decided to not speak about their engagement nor understand why Harriet didn’t tell Emma earlier about her feelings for Mr. Knightley and I don’t always understand Emma’s actions) but overall, I think they are all really interesting and they all bring something new, fresh and a reflection upon the book and the different topics. I also think it is quite interesting to view all the different type of “happily ever after”. It is always with a wedding, true, but the characters experience a different type of wedding and their own are not the same. I think it was great to see that even the end of a story can have multiple happily ever after. If we were to do a retelling where Emma did not marry Mr. Knightley, could we have had considered it a “happily ever after”? I think so because she would have had been happy either way. In the end what matters the most for it to be a happily ever after it is if the characters are happy more than our own vision of this sentence.

Jane Austen's sparkling and flawless comic masterpiece is the story of Emma Woodhouse- rich, charming, spoilt, obsessed with matchmaking and blind to everyone's faults - including her own. Although Austen described Emma as a character 'whom no one but myself will much like', her wit and her gradual self-realization make her one of the author's most remarkable, believably imperfect heroines.

Andrea Mack

Last summer I had been watching the BBC versions of Jane Austen’s books. Then I realized… I’ve only ever read Pride & Prejudice! That was kind of a huge bummer, especially since I call myself a book worm. So I decided I should fix that…

So I picked up Emma by Jane Austen and jumped right in.

Except it wasn’t so much as jumping in; it was more of a trudging through incredibly heavy, sticky mud. While language doesn’t typically bother me, the mood I was in at the time made it so I just couldn’t face the English. I got maybe 40 pages in before I was starting to force myself to read two pages a night. Eventually I just gave up on trying. I wanted to read “candy books”, which are books you could read in a day or two, but don’t really take much effort on the reader’s part to finish.

And that surprised me a little, because out of the film and BBC versions of Austen’s books, Emma is my favourite!! So why wouldn’t I want to read something that I already knew I would like?

With the start of the new year, I was filled with renewed determination. I would finish Emma!

I managed to fly through it this time. It’s something we talk about at work a fair amount, is that you definitely need to be in the mood for certain books. And if you’re not in the mood to read it, you’re best to put it down and try something else.

Emma turned out to be better than I had been expecting!

The problem with film versions is that so many of the nuances and character development need to be cut out to keep the films to a reasonable length. Reading Emma gives you much more development between Emma and Mr. Knightley that it surprised me. There are nuances in the story that simply get lost when it’s put on the screen, but that are definitely needed to help give the story that added kick in the bum!

I will say, though, that the latest BBC version does a fabulous job translating the book to the screen. Much better than the film version.

Emma gets three and a half stars, and only loses half a star because I couldn’t get into it the first time. But since there are no half stars here, it gets four! 

[Originally posted to A Novel Idea, February 8, 2011. ]

Emma

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