It is set in the fictional country village of Highbury and the surrounding estates of Hartfield, Randalls and Donwell Abbey, and involves the relationships among people from a small number of families.

"[3] In the first sentence, she introduces the title character by stating "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

"[4] Emma is spoiled, headstrong, and self-satisfied; she greatly overestimates her own matchmaking abilities; she is blind to the dangers of meddling in other people's lives; and her imagination and perceptions often lead her astray.

Frank is given to dancing and living a carefree existence, and is secretly engaged to Miss Fairfax at Weymouth, although he fears his aunt will forbid the match because Jane is not wealthy.

Robert Martin is a well-to-do, 24-year-old tenant farmer who, though not a gentleman, is a friendly, amiable and diligent young man, well esteemed by Mr George Knightley.

Mrs Elton repeatedly makes contradictory and unbelievable declarations about her background, such as exaggerated claims of the similarity between Emma's estate, Hartfield, and her brother-in-law's manor, Maple Grove, revealing her dishonesty and enforcing the idea that she is a scheming parvenu trying her utmost to conceal her lower origins.

Mr & Mrs Cole have been residents of Highbury for several years, but have recently benefited from a significant increase in their income that has allowed them to expand the size of their house, number of servants and other expenses.

The subjects are not often elegant, and certainly never grand: but they are finished up to nature, and with a precision which delights the reader.Two other unsigned reviews appeared in 1816, one in The Champion, also in March, and another in September of the same year in Gentleman's Magazine.

A contemporary Scottish novelist, Susan Edmonstone Ferrier, wrote to a friend, also in 1816:[22]"I have been reading Emma, which is excellent; there is no story whatever, and the heroine is not better than other people; but the characters are all true to life and the style so piquant, that it does not require the adventitious aids of mystery and adventure."

[28] Although Austen's Pride and Prejudice is the most popular of her novels, Robert McCrum suggests that Emma "is her masterpiece, mixing the sparkle of her early books with a deep sensibility".

[29][30] Additionally, academic John Mullan argued that Emma was a revolutionary novel which changed the shape of what is possible in fiction" because it "bent narration through the distorting lens of its protagonist’s mind".

[31] The British critic Robert Irvine wrote that unlike the situation in Austen's previous novels, the town of Highbury in Surrey emerges as a character in its own right.

[32] Irvine wrote that: "In Emma, we find something much closer to a genuinely communal voice, a point of view at work in the narrative that cannot be reduced to the subjectivity of any one character.

[32] Irvine used as an example the following passage: "The charming Augusta Hawkins, in addition to all the usual advantages of perfect beauty and merit, was in possession of as many thousands as would always be called ten; a point of some dignity, as well as some convenience: the story told well; he had not thrown himself away-he had gained a woman of £10,000 or thereabouts; and he had gained with delightful rapidity-the first hour of introduction he had been so very soon followed by distinguishing notice; the history which he had to give Mrs Cole of the rise and progress of the affair was so glorious".

[37] However, political power still resides with men in the patriarchal society of Regency England as the book notes that Mr Knightley is not only a member of the gentry, but also serves as the magistrate of Highbury.

[43] The marriage of Emma to Mr Knightley consolidates her social authority by linking herself to the dominant male of Highbury and pushes Mrs Elton's claims aside.

[43] However, as the novel goes, such a reading is countered by the way that Emma begins to take in the previously excluded into the realm of the elite, such as visiting the poor Miss Bates and her mother, and the Coles, whose wealth stems from trade.

Her cousin Eliza Hancock may have been her inspiration for the character Edward Stanley in "Catharine, or the Bower," one of her youthful pieces, showing her the "trick of changing the gender of her prototype.

"[47]: 102  In Pride and Prejudice, Thomas Lefroy, a charming and witty Irishman, may have been the basis for Elizabeth's personality, while Austen may have used herself as the model for Darcy's reserve and self-consciousness when among company, but open and loving demeanor when among close friends and family.

[50] Austen satirizes this debate by having Miss Bates talk about Mrs Dixon's new house in Ireland, a place that she cannot decide is a kingdom, a country or a province, but is merely very "strange" whatever its status may be.

[50] Austen further alludes to the Society of United Irishmen uprising in 1798 by having the other characters worry about what might happen to the Dixons when they visit a place in the Irish countryside called "Baly-craig", which appears to be Ballycraig in County Antrim in what is now Northern Ireland, which had been the scene of much bloody fighting between the United Irishmen Society and the Crown in 1798, an enduring testament to Ireland's unsettled status with much of the Irish population not accepting British rule.

Unlike Marianne Dashwood, who is attracted to the wrong man before she settles on the right one, Emma generally shows no romantic interest in the men she meets and even her flirting with Churchill seems tame.

For example, at the beginning of Chapter XIII, Emma has "no doubt of her being in love", but it quickly becomes clear that, even though she spends time "forming a thousand amusing schemes for the progress and close of their attachment", we are told that "the conclusion of every imaginary declaration on his side was that she refused him".

He plays an integral role in Emma's own initial perception of matrimony, leading her to make use of her free time by becoming the town "matchmaker", which leaves her happily single and unwed for the majority of the novel.

The narrator announces at the start of the novel: "The real evils of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much of her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments" (Austen, 1).

Still, the reader cannot ignore the developmental damage that has been caused by Mr Woodhouse's indifferent parenting style as Emma struggles to form healthy adult relationships.

The social class structure has the Woodhouses and Mr Knightley at the top, the Eltons, the Westons, Frank Churchill, and even further down the line Harriet, Robert Martin, and the Bates family including Jane Fairfax.

For instance, when Emma discusses her charitable visit with a poor family, Harriet's encounter with the gypsy children, and Highbury's mysterious chicken thieves.

[64] Emma's sister Isabella and her family live in Brunswick Square, between the City of London and the West End; the fields had just been transformed at the turn of the century into terraces of Georgian houses.

The school is based on Reading Abbey Girls' School, which Austen and her sister attended briefly:[65] not of a seminary, or an establishment, or any thing which professed, in long sentences of refined nonsense, to combine liberal acquirements with elegant morality upon new principles and new systems – and where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity – but a real, honest, old-fashioned Boarding-school, where a reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price, and where girls might be sent to be out of the way and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming back prodigies.Emma has been the subject of many adaptations for film, TV, radio and the stage.