<p><b>Introduction by A. Walton Litz</b></p><p>'Emma Woodhouse handsome clever and rich with a comfortable home and happy disposition seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.' So begins Jane Austen's comic masterpiece <i>Emma</i>. In <i>Emma </i>Austen's prose brilliantly elevates in the words of Virginia Woolf 'the trivialities of day-to-day existence of parties picnics and country dances' of early-nineteenth-century life in the English countryside to an unrivaled level of pleasure for the reader. At the center of this world is the inimitable Emma Woodhouse a self-proclaimed matchmaker who by the novel's conclusion may just find herself the victim of her own best intentions.</p>