This year it was my purpose to read all of Austen’s works – which I have been ignorant of in my first 26 years of life –, and was able to almost achieve my endeavour, having left for 2024 only Mansfield Park. 

 

In this exercise – which I admit was very heterodox – I discovered Emma (both the novel and the character) and fell in love with it and with her. It was my first and favourite book of the corpus. I believe Austen deployed all of her many skills in this one novel, creating a character which is both likeable and flawed. 

 

All that I can say about Emma has already been said. My only contribution to the analysis has been a ranking of which of Austen’s characters would integrate well with my circle of friends at my work. Very specific and probably an awful way of ranking novels, but it helped me. 

 

Emma ranks the highest.