Emma, by Jane Austen, is a novel about youthful hubris and the perils of misconstrued romance. The novel was first published in December 1815. As in her other novels, Austen explores the concerns and difficulties of genteel women living in Georgian-Regency England; she also creates a lively comedy of manners among her characters. Before she began the novel, Austen wrote, "I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like." In the very first sentence she introduces the title character as "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich." Emma, however, is also rather spoiled, headstrong, and self-satisfied; she greatly overestimates her own matchmaking abilities; she is blind to the dangers of meddling in other people's lives; and her imagination and perceptions often lead her astray.
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English fiction at the turn of the nineteenth century gained a distinctly realistic character through comic novels depicting ordinary people in everyday life, as best seen in Pride and Prejudice. The novelist Jane Austen, born on December 16, 1775, in Steventon, Hampshire, produced six major novels that interpret, critique, and comment upon the English landed gentry at the end of the eighteenth century.
Born the seventh child of the country clergyman Rev. George Austen and his wife Cassandra, Jane Austen spent her first twenty-five years at Steventon Rectory, where she began writing as a teenager. After moving to Bath in 1801 and later residing in Southampton following her father's death in 1805, she eventually settled at Chawton with her mother and elder sister Cassandra. Austen published four novels during her lifetime—Sense and Sensibility in 1811, Pride and Prejudice in 1813, Mansfield Park in 1814, and Emma in 1815—all published anonymously. She died in Winchester on July 18, 1817.
Six months after her death in 1817, her novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published together in a posthumous edition. Her brother Henry Thomas Austen contributed a prefatory 'Biographical Notice' that named Jane Austen publicly for the first time as the author of all her published works. Further biographical detail reached the public in 1870 when her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh published A Memoir of Jane Austen.
Austen's narratives frequently focus on the economic and social dependence of women on marriage to secure financial stability and social standing. Her sharp social commentary, realistic characterizations, and masterful use of irony serve as implicit critiques of late eighteenth-century novels of sensibility. By grounding her stories in the domestic realities of the English middle and upper classes, her writing marks an important transition toward nineteenth-century literary realism.
