CHAPTER II

Jane Austen

Emma Woodhouse has lived nearly twenty-one years in the village of Highbury with very little to distress or vex her. Bored, confident and certain of her own judgment, she takes up matchmaking, starting with her sweet, impressionable friend Harriet Smith. Her schemes go wrong in every direction. The vicar proposes to the wrong woman, a charming newcomer is keeping a secret, and the one person who tells Emma the truth, her old friend Mr. Knightley, is the last person she wants to hear it from. Austen expected that no one but herself would much like her heroine. Two centuries of readers have proved her wrong.