This premium quality edition includes the complete, unabridged text of Jane Austen's classic tale of good intentions gone bad in a freshly edited and newly typeset edition. With a generous 6" x 9" page size, this edition is printed on heavyweight 60# bright white paper with a fully laminated cover featuring an original full color design.

Emma...

The fourth of Jane Austen's published novels, Emma appeared in December 1815 to generally positive reviews and solid sales, following second editions of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. A lively comedy of manners, Emma is also a novel about youthful hubris and the consequences of misinterpreted romance.

As in Austen's other novels, the unfairness of the British legal and cultural systems that left women dependent upon marriage and family for social standing and economic security is an underlying theme as Austen, with characteristic dry humor and wit, explores the concerns and difficulties of genteel women living in the Georgian-Regency period in England.

Austen set out to create a story around "a heroine whom no one but myself will much like," and in the opening sentence introduces "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich." But Emma is spoiled, headstrong, self-satisfied, and not quite so wise or intuitive as she believes herself to be. Having attended a wedding where she had introduced the bride and groom and given herself credit for the marriage, she concludes that she should turn her attention to matchmaking. Against advice she pursues her new interest, oblivious to the fact that her imagination often colors her perceptions and blind to the dangers of meddling in other people's lives.

Jane Austen...

Born into a family at the lowest tier of the English landed gentry, Jane Austen (1775-1817) found modest critical and financial success in her lifetime, but by 1830 her books had been out of print for a decade when the copyrights were purchased and new illustrated editions included in Richard Bentley's popular "Standard Novels" series. With wider exposure they gained popularity and stature, and sold steadily if not spectacularly. Throughout the 19th century Austen's work had an admiring following among Britain's self-proclaimed "literary elite," but it was really not until the early twentieth century that her novels became the object of academic studies as "great literature".

Austen's work was part of the transition to realism in 19th century British literature, and her romantic fiction, set for the most part among the gentry of the English countryside was marked by dry wit, satire, and sharp social commentary, often directed at the unfairness of the British legal and cultural systems that left women dependent upon marriage and family for social standing and economic security. In Pride and Prejudice, for example, Austen uses the repetitive complaints of the mother to attack, indirectly and humorously, the "entailed estate", a form of ownership in which only male heirs can inherit real estate, making the father's cousin, not his wife and daughters, the legal heir to their home.

With the exception of a short period at a boarding school and visits to a brother who was, for a time, a London banker, Austen lived her entire life within a close-knit family group very much like the gentry who make up the characters of her novels, mainly located in the countryside very much like the settings of her novels. In a cruelly ironic twist, Austen's family would suffer the fate feared by Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice when her father died, unexpectedly, leaving his wife and unmarried daughters destitute and dependent upon her brothers for support.