UBSPD World Classics are basically for those reading major international novels for the first time, particularly students. Each volume comprises the complete text, with an introduction and detailed notes on each chapter. Coupled with this is information on the author and background to the novel.
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 receives help her to achieve a greater degree of self-knowledge that 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, Emmaa, 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 countinues, with marginal adjustments, to the present day.
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 receives help her to achieve a greater degree of self-knowledge that 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, Emmaa, 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 countinues, with marginal adjustments, to the present day.