Emma / Jane Austen,

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Emma is the typical rich and clever girl whose overconfidence in her own understanding of people and well-meaning desire to manipulate the lives of her social inferiors as well as some of her equals involve her in a number of delusions. The shocks and later disappointments she recieves help to achieve a greater degree of self- knowledge than she possessed before she started on her self-appointed career of reform. The novel sets little traps for Emma's vanity and self-importance and she falls into every one of them. She takes under her protection Harriet Smith, "the natural daughter of somebody", and decides to arrange a suitable marriage for her with a foolish young man who proposes to Emma herself to her disgust and annoyance!
Like Jane Austen's other novels, Emma, too has been considered a novel of young ladies finding proper husbands or a novel of social manners in early Victorian England. While it is this, it is much more a description of the emergence of the stratified class society and the social hierarchy of England which continues, with marginal adjustments, to the present day.