Emma

Emma Woodhouse is twenty, rich, motherless, mistress of her father's house, and certain she can read every heart in Highbury better than its owner can. She takes up Harriet Smith — seventeen, illegitimate, boarded at the village school — as a project, sets about arranging her marriage, then everyone else's, and gets all of them wrong, her own included. Nothing violent happens. The cruelty, when it comes, is a single remark at a picnic on Box Hill, and the book makes her pay for it. Otherwise the plot runs on misread glances, a charade, and a pianoforte that arrives from nobody. If the sentences are not doing it for you by chapter three, there is nothing else here to enjoy.