The real evils, indeed, of Emma's situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself.Emma is young, rich and independent. She has decided not to get married and instead spends her time organizing her acquaintances' love affairs. Her plans for the matrimonial success of her new friend Harriet, however, lead her into complications that ultimately test her own detachment from the world of romance.Biographie de l'auteurJane Austen was born in Steventon rectory on 16 December 1775. Her family later moved to Bath, then to Southampton and finally to Chawton in Hampshire. She began writingPride and Prejudice when she was twenty-two years old. It was originally calledFirst Impressions and was initially rejected by the publishers and only published in 1813 after much revision. She published four of her novels in her lifetime,Sense and Sensibility (1811),Pride and Prejudice (1813),Mansfield Park (1814) andEmma (1816). Jane Austen died on 18th July 1817.Northanger Abbey andPersuasion were both published posthumously in 1818.Andrew Motion is the former Poet Laureate, co-founded the Poetry Archive and was knighted for his services to literature in 2009. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in London.