It's a classic for a reason. Lovely story, delightfully told. ( )

Before reading the book Emma by Jane Austen, I made the mistake of watching the 1999 movie version starring Gwyneth Paltrow. For some reason I just did not like this movie and I found that I could not sympathize with our heroine Emma because I just plain did not like her. I found her childish, self-absorbed and meddling. Since watching this movie I have been a bit prejudice with the story and I never really wanted to try my hand at reading the book itself. I have been lately re-reading most of Jane Austen’s novels and I realized what a disservice I have been doing myself all of this time by not reading this book. I dug out my copy of Emma and I began to read. The basic plot everyone knows and not a lot happens but I realized that the writing is wonderful and what a truly fantastic heroine Emma is. She is flawed, probably the most flawed of all of Austen’s heroines but the best part about Emma’s personality is that this makes her more human and more like us. She is able to see when she does wrong and she tries at the end of the book to atone for some of the mistakes she made about people’s characters. Of course the novel is filled with Austen’s wonderful characterizations of human personalities, and I think that since Emma is one of her later novels she had perfected her art of characterizing people and making them such wonderful individuals to read about whether they are more for comic purposes than to be a main character.
This addition also contains some wonderful supplemental background information of Jane Austen as well as some of her letters and also what other writers have thought of her works and of this book in particular. I love reading other’s opinions on Jane Austen and what they feel she thought or felt since we can’t ask her ourselves so I found the information in this addition excellent. ( )

Norton Critical Edition, criticism