Emma

What follows is Emma turning her attentions to Harriet Smith, a pretty, sweet-natured girl of unknown birth whom she takes up as a project. She means to improve Harriet, to steer her away from a farmer's honest proposal, and to arrange a far grander love for her with the ambitious young clergyman Mr. Elton. Every reader can see where this is bound, and that is the pleasure of it. Emma cannot. "You have been no friend to Harriet Smith, Emma," Knightley warns, and the misjudgments quietly begin to pile up.

Jane Austen tells all this with a wry, observing intelligence that lets the reader see straight past the polite dialogue into everyone's private hopes. Highbury fills with its small comedies — a valetudinarian father anxious over the vanishing wedding-cake, an elegant pianoforte arriving from Broadwood's to sit incongruously in modest rooms. And there is Miss Bates, poor and kindly and endlessly talkative, whom the whole village loves without quite being able to say why.

"I should like to see Emma in love, and in some doubt of a return," Knightley says early on. "It would do her good." A book about a young woman so sure she can read every heart but her own, written by an author who misses nothing, and forgives a great deal.