Emma
Jane Austen(1813)
Extract
Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.
A young woman of fortune and leisure, handsome and clever and satisfied with herself, decides to arrange the romantic lives of everyone around her and gets nearly all of it wrong. Jane Austen's 1815 novel is her most intricate comedy of misperception, a book in which the heroine's confidence is precisely what blinds her. Emma Woodhouse reads every situation through the lens of her own imagination, matchmaking where no match exists, missing the love that stands quietly at her side. Austen constructs a world so finely calibrated that each conversation hums with meanings the speaker does not intend. It is a novel about the education of attention, the slow, humbling discovery that understanding others begins with understanding oneself.
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Austen's other masterwork of self-deception, where the heroine is quicker to see her own faults.
Flaubert takes another bored provincial woman and removes the comedy: what remains is the scalpel.
Wilde matches Austen's precision about social performance, but gives everyone permission to lie.