'Handsome, clever, and rich,' Emma Woodhouse is quite certain she knows what everyone around her should want — and quite blind to her own heart. Jane Austen said she was choosing a heroine no one but herself would much like, and then wrote her funniest and most perfectly constructed novel around her, a comedy in which every scheme of matchmaking misfires. The plot is a puzzle whose every clue lies open on the page, and almost no first reader ever spots them. This edition presents the complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 50 full-page color plates — Gainsborough's country gentry, Hogarth's marriage market.
