Emma by Jane Austen (1813)

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.