Emma

"3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on", Jane Austen wrote, in September 1814, to a niece with literary ambitions. 

The advice undoutedly reflected Jane Austen's satisfaction with her own work in progress, a novel in which the village of Highbury provides the setting for the moral and emotional education of Emma Woodhouse, a heroine 'handsome, clever, and rich' but spoiled by 'the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself'.

Emma was the last novel which Jane Austen lived to see through the press, and is perhaps her most perfect and representative work, happily combining the qualities for which she has been most admired; irony, wit, realism, vivid characterization, moral seriousness, and faultless control of tone and narrative method.