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.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.