Emma
Emma Woodhouse has a theory about love: she finds it far easier to see it in others than to recognize it in herself. Handsome, clever, and thoroughly convinced of her own brilliance, she spends her days in the tranquil village of Highbury playing architect to her friends' hearts. Yet every match she makes goes gloriously, instructively wrong. What begins as harmless entertainment becomes a tangled web of misplaced affection, wounded pride, and the slow, sometimes painful dawning of self-knowledge. Through it all, Austen's pen is merciless: she lets us laugh at Emma's absurd confidence while gradually revealing the loneliness and uncertainty beneath the wit. The result is a novel that functions simultaneously as a sparkling comedy of manners and a surprisingly tender study of how we blind ourselves to our own hearts. It is Austen's most playful work, but also her most psychologically acute.
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“If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.””
— Jane Austen
“Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.””
— Jane Austen
“I may have lost my heart, but not my self-control. ””
— Jane Austen
“I cannot make speeches, Emma...If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am. You hear nothing but truth from me. I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it.””
— Jane Austen
“I always deserve the best treatment because I never put up with any other.””
— Jane Austen
“Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.””
— Jane Austen
“There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves.””
— Jane Austen
“One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.””
— Jane Austen
“You must be the best judge of your own happiness.””
— Jane Austen
![Love and Freindship [sic]](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fd3b2n8gj62qnwr.cloudfront.net%2FCOVERS%2Fgutenberg_covers75k%2Febook-1212.png&w=3840&q=75)
