Emma
Austen's most formally perfect novel. A young woman convinced of her matchmaking gift is, page by page, shown to be wrong about everyone — her friends, her suitors, herself. The free indirect style she pioneered is here at full power: you experience Emma's blind spots from inside them. Virginia Woolf called Austen the most perfect of artists, and Emma is the proof.
Emma is “such a vain and arrogant main character” for a long stretch, writing off Robert Martin as beneath Harriet in a way that reads as plain meanness rather than a flaw waiting to be outgrown. Miss Bates’s speeches run long enough that readers skip them outright, and around them sit chapters where little happens: “Jane rambles about nothing for chapters and chapters.” Readers also flag how long Knightley has been watching Emma grow up, which unsettles the romance for them. Set beside Pride and Prejudice it is the cooler book and a poor place to start Austen. Many bounce off it once and come back only years later.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
