Publisher's Synopsis
In this book summary, study guide, character list, Glossary are included as bonus.As has often been done, one can - and with truth - say that Emma, like Jane Austen's other novels, deals with the subject of young ladies finding proper husbands. On the surface this is what the story line of Emma is about, but the total subject matter of the book concerns much more than that. Within the chosen limits of upper-middle-class society and within the even more limited strict feminine point of view for telling the story (all the events are presented from within a domestic or social context, though not, as has been claimed, merely from within a drawing room), Miss Austen is fervently preoccupied with the way people behave. And this is the broad area of the moralist. If the moralist chooses, as Miss Austen does, to focus on the common rather than the exceptional behavior of people, he is more likely to write comedy than tragedy. If he is furthermore, a serious moralist, perceptive and understanding enough to keep a part, but only a part, of himself disengaged from the contradictory entanglements of his subject matter, his comedy has a good chance of being realized in terms of ironic sati
