How does it compare to audio works by the same author?
Excellent
Advantages:
Witty, brilliant characters
Disadvantages:
Quite lengthy, as predictable as any other love story
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
Emma makes for superb reading, better in my opinion than Austen's rather more popular Pride and Prejudice. Austen writes, as always, with great wit and puts forward a rather tongue-in-cheek insight into the life of a young woman, very conscious of social order and hierarchy, whose failed attempts at match-making and trying to understand the relationships between the people around her lead her to realise that she cannot ever comprehend the ways of her friends if she cannot understand her own heart.
Emma contains some excellent characters, my favourites being the talkative Miss Bates, who, although irritating is depicted as very worthy, humble and grateful to those of better social standing than herself and is overall a truly endearing character, and the repulsive Mrs Elton whose puffed up view of herself makes her perfectly detestable.
I would always recommend Jane Austen as an excellent example of period romance writing, and Emma is the favourite of Austen's book I have read. If you are charmed by period writing, be it through reading other books or from seeing the many films and TV adaptations, Emma is certainly worth purchasing, the cost for such classics being £1-2, so even if you don't enjoy it you've not really lost anything. Emma is also suitable as a first step into period classics, or into Jane Austen, as it really demonstrates her writing talent.
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