Emma

Now a major motion picture starring Anya Taylor-Joy

Beautiful, clever, rich—and single—Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr. Knightley and attempts to arrange a suitable match for her protégée, Harriet Smith, her carefully laid plans soon unravel and have consequences that she never expected. With its imperfect but charming heroine and its witty and subtle exploration of relationships, Emma is often seen as Jane Austen’s most flawless work.

This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition celebrates two hundred years of Austen’s beloved novel. With a beautiful cover designed by illustrator Dadu Shin and comprehensive notes drawing specially from the Jane Austen Collection at Goucher College, this is an edition to be treasured by students and collectors alike.

Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

About the Contributors

Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in Steventon, a small village in Hampshire, England. As a girl, she wrote stories, including burlesques of popular romances. She lived with her family in Steventon until her father, a clergyman in the Church of England, retired in 1801. After his death, in 1805, she, her mother, and her sister did not have a settled home until 1809, when they moved to Chawton, Hampshire. There she was extraordinarily productive, revising three novels and writing three more from scratch. Published during her lifetime were Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815). Austen died on July 18, 1817, in Winchester, where she was receiving medical treatment, and was buried in that city’s cathedral. Two more novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, were published posthumously in 1817 with a biographical notice by her brother Henry Austen, the first formal announcement of her authorship. She also left two earlier compositions: a short epistolary novel, Lady Susan, and an unfinished novel, The Watsons. At the time of her death, she was working on a new novel, Sanditon, a fragmentary draft of which survives.

Juliette Wells is Professor of Literary Studies at Goucher College, where she is active in outreach relating to the library’s distinguished Jane Austen Collection. She is the author of three histories of Austen’s readers and fans, most recently A New Jane Austen: How Americans Brought Us the World’s Greatest Novelist. For Penguin Classics, she edited the 200th-anniversary deluxe editions of Austen’s Emma and Persuasion. She was guest co-curator for the Morgan Library & Museum’s 2025 exhibition A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250.