Emma Woodhouse — handsome, clever, rich, and sure she reads every heart in the village better than its owner does — appoints herself matchmaker to a naïve younger friend and gets every romance around her exactly wrong, her own included. Austen hands her no villains and no hardship, only a comfortable world and a mind quick enough to fool itself, and lets the comedy turn on everything the reader can see and Emma cannot. Austen expected no one but herself would much care for so spoiled a heroine, then built around her the most flawlessly engineered comedy of manners in English — a book where every clue sits in plain sight and every first-time reader is taken in anyway.