"Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition...had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her." The celebrated opening of Jane Austen's Emma introduces readers to a supremely self-assured and accomplished young woman who believes herself immune to romance. By turns brilliant and foolish, self-aware and self-deluding, Emma "leaps from error to error," writes Margaret Drabble in her incisive Introduction, wreaking comic havoc in the lives of those around her.