Emma Woodhouse — Emma

Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse — "handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition" — is the most self-satisfied and self-deluding of Austen's heroines, and the one whose education the author follows with the most amused affection. Her misguided matchmaking and her inability to recognise her own feelings for Knightley until she is in danger of losing him make her the funniest and most human of Austen's characters.