Emma Paperback by Jane Austen

It may be a good book, but the print is small. also, it was published in 1815 & the language is very different than what we are used to today. I was having to analyze every sentence, not very enjoyable for me, Recommend looking for a larger print book.

I look forward to reading the book before watching the movie that just was released to watch at home

Makes you appreciate Jane Austen. Read the book before watching the movie.

Its the size of a cookbook and the chapters are ongoing, like no page break. I just hate the size and setup- it doesnt feel like a novel but more like an owners manual.

Emma was cute, and charming, and everything I expected her to be. The chatter and banter among all the characters is highly entertaining, and I love the insight they gave into life in those times as well as Jane Austens thoughts on life in those times through the conversations. Overall, this one is a keeper. I feel like I could read it again and again and pick up something new every time.

The product was very nice.

To be fair, my review of Emma has nothing to do with the accomplished Jane Austen or what I am certain is a witty, engaging story. I love Jane Austen and I love books, well I loved them more before I started ordering them from Amazon. First let me say that Amazon is, as someone once said, “like a “box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.” That has been my experience ordering from Amazon over the years. When it comes to books, the “look inside” feature is unhelpful when it shows a different version of the book than the one I am ordering. With classic books, not all reprints are created equal. The book I received was large, like an elementary schoolbook, and still, the amount of text on the page is voluminous. Is there a paper shortage? And there are no real paragraphs. Paragraphs not only indicate a change of thought paragraphs help to make the text more readable; they give your eyes a rest. The text in this book is distracting, making it unpleasant to read. And some of the text is centered rather than left justified. Upon further examination of the details, I found that this book was created by CreateSpace. Since Emma is in the public domain, someone was able to reprint Austen’s work and make money. I guess this is legal, ethical, perhaps. But come on Amazon, where’s the quality control? Who do I blame for this crime against good literature?

I wish there was a place I could go and pick up the book of my choice and test-drive it before I buy it. Hold it in my hand and leaf through the pages. Get a whiff of that new book smell. What a novel idea! (Yeah, I know.) In the future, I may not get all my books this way, but I will certainly try to find my classic books in an actual bookstore. Hey, I just want to love books again.

Emma was published on this day in 1815. It was the last novel completed and published during Jane Austen’s life, and it follows the tenets of the author’s entire body of work: the tale is a work of satire, gently mocking in tone, ambiguous and ironic in style. Set in the tiny fictional town of Highbury in Regency England, the novel follows the exploits of Emma Woodhouse, “handsome, clever, and rich.”

Austen herself wrote that Emma was “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” The titular character is strong, intelligent, and impeccably flawed. She lives a charmed life, so charmed she is relentlessly bored and sets about meddling in others’ lives to relieve that boredom. She is misguided and blind, judgmental and foolish. And yet she still manages to be winsome and, to my mind, Austen’s most likable heroine. The charm of Emma lies in the fact that while she may be haughty, she is not cruel, and while she may be erroneous more often than not, her machinations are never malicious. And whereas Emma may be Austen’s most likable heroine, George Knightley is arguably her best romantic hero. He acts as the perfect foil for Emma: observant where she is not, thoughtful where she is not, self-aware where she is not. Even so, he sees the best in her and challenges her to live up to that potential. Austen has stock characters she reuses in each of her novels but she manages to recreate them as distinct individuals in each tale, and that is no different here in Emma in the characters such as Mr. Elton and Miss Bates, etc. Two of Austen’s greatest strengths are creating characters who are sympathetic, even if they are not likable, and detaching herself enough from the characters to mock even her favourites.

On the surface, Emma is a humourous coming of age story and romance, but typical of the author, Austen imbues the tale with a critique of societal expectations and binding gender roles. In the world Austen lived and wrote in, marriage was an economic game of chess, less about love than about land, money, and class. There are a number of juxtapositions explored in Emma: societal expectations and the dependence on those conventions, the implications of having an estate and not owning a home, the follies of love and compatibility (namely financial), and the difference between respectability and pretension. While Austen critiqued the class system, it was the system in which she lived, and her work cannot help but also endorse the very thing she satirizes.

Emma is a tale filled with hubris and charm. The story is an insightful glimpse into the lives of women in the early nineteenth century, and it holds all the sly wit and humour for which Jane Austen is still known and loved.

Highly recommended for fans of classic literature, especially literature that focuses on the daily lives of genteel women in the Georgian-Regency era and literature that is slyly satirical of societal conventions.

I chose to purchase this version of Emma because of the beautiful cover. When it came I saw the unwieldy size. The pages are huge and the writing is very small making this a very disappointing book to read because of how long it would take to read each page. I will have to buy a different version of Emma as it will not fit on my bookshelves and would frankly be embarrassing to read in front of people.

Whoever formatted this book should be fired. There are no indentations at the start of a new paragraph and its printed on these slightly too big sheets, and thees very little breathing room on the page. Its like a solid block of text. Its really not ideal. Its a lazy print.