Jane Austen
Emma's pride
AC Grayling on Jane Austen's pre-Freudian analysis of humanity and follyEmma
Jane Austen
First published by John Murray, 1816
Saturday 8 June 2002 00.06 BST
Jane Austen painted a large universe on her "two square inches of ivory". In the narrow round of life as lived by country gentry in late Georgian times, in the interesting but even narrower margin of that epoch in young ladies' lives when they are looking about them for a husband, she found and anatomised fundamental features of human sense, pride, prejudice and sensibility.