In the Library
Emma
Jane Austen, 1815
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 11 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 55
- Length
- Length 157k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
Austen's other masterwork of self-deception, where the heroine is quicker to see her own faults.
£1.99
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
Flaubert takes another bored provincial woman and removes the comedy: what remains is the scalpel.
£1.99
The Importance of Being Earnest
Oscar Wilde
Wilde matches Austen's precision about social performance, but gives everyone permission to lie.
£1.99
About the book
You will think yourself smarter than Emma Woodhouse, and that is the trap. Handsome, clever, and rich, she sets about arranging the loves of everyone in Highbury, certain she can read a heart at a glance, and Jane Austen keeps you sealed so snugly inside Emma's head that you misread the village just as she does, charmed the whole way down. Then comes the picnic at Box Hill, where Emma, bored and dazzling, makes a small cruel joke at the expense of harmless, chattering Miss Bates, who is too poor and too kind to defend herself. Mr. Knightley's reproof afterward is so quiet and so exact that the laughter dies in your own throat. That is the wager of the novel: most books let you see more than the heroine, and Emma bets you will see exactly as little. The rebuke that humbles her humbles you, and you close the book knowing yourself a shade better than when you opened it.