Emma

Emma Woodhouse is not your typical Jane Austen heroine: she is not dependent, her status and finances are not precarious, and she doesn't need to find a husband (preferably one who loves her and whom she loves) to secure her future. On the contrary, she is a young woman who is "intelligent, beautiful, and wealthy," who does not aspire to marriage ("a single woman in possession of a good fortune is always respectable"), and who, as if by natural right, governs the destinies of the small community of Highbury. Jane Austen said that a young woman like this "could only please me." Perhaps she was aware that she was making a protagonist, for the first time in the history of the novel, a woman who, before reaching that "exquisite tremor of happiness" that crowns the thrilling adventures of her heroines, had to submit to the Socratic principle of self-knowledge. Emma (1816) is a dazzling comedy of errors, full of concealments, intrigues and mistakes that often inspire secondhand embarrassment, but in which the sense of the ridiculous serves as a vehicle for success, frankness and common sense.