Emma
About this audiobook
Emma was written after the publication of Pride and Prejudice and was the last novel of Jane Austen to be published in her lifetime.
Of the title character, Austen wrote: “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” Emma is a vivacious twenty-year-old, who has spent her life in the pleasant seclusion of a village community and who lives with her widowed valetudinarian father. Most of the neighbors admire and approve of her, except for George Knightley, a local landowner, who often expresses his disapproval of Emma’s highhanded and controlling tendencies, in particular her assumption of the unofficial role of matchmaker. Much of the early action focuses on Emma’s attempt to encourage the courtship of her ingenuous friend Harriet Smith and Philip Elton, the local vicar. When this scheme fails, Emma switches her attention to her own romantic attachments, and again errs in misjudging the behavior of a potential suitor, Frank Churchill. However, in the end, as in all Austen novels, all the eligible couples are satisfactorily paired off, and Emma is led to understand how little she previously knew about how truly long-lasting relationships are formed.
Like all the other works of Jane Austen, Emma has been used as the basis for a number of presentations on film and television series, including Clueless, a 1995 American romcom.
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About the author
Jane Austen, the daughter of a clergyman, was born in Hampshire in 1775, and later lived in Bath and the village of Chawton. As a child and teenager, she wrote brilliantly witty stories for her family's amusement, as well as a novella, Lady Susan. Her first published novel was Sense and Sensibility, which appeared in 1811 and was soon followed by Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma. Austen died in 1817, and Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were published posthumously in 1818.
Graham Scott is a narrator and voice actor based in the UK. As well as solo performances of works by authors including PG Wodehouse, Charles Dickens, R Austin Freeman, Dorothy L. Sayers, Jules Verne, Anna Katherine Green, Joseph Conrad, GK Chesterton, and John Buchan, Graham is also a regular performer in group productions with both Voices of Today and the Online Stage. Website: www.GrahamScottAudio.com
Denis Daly is an audiobook narrator and codirector of Voices of Today, an Australian spoken word production house.
