Emma

Twenty-one, rich, with nothing she is required to do, and completely confident about the romantic lives of everyone around her. Emma Woodhouse is wrong on nearly every count, and you will see it well before she does.

Austen ran the whole novel through Emma’s perception, which is why it reads as comedy the first time and as something colder the second: the same evidence fooled you too. Almost nothing happens in Highbury. Then on a summer outing to Box Hill she says something needlessly cruel to a poor, harmless, chattering woman, and Mr Knightley replies in four sentences that hit harder than the deaths and ruins other novelists reach for.