Jane Austen (1775-1817) is one of English literature's greatest and most widely-read writers - one of the four 'great English novelists' according to F. R. Leavis (along with George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad). Emma was the fourth of Austen's six novels to be published. Of the eponymous Emma, Austen wrote 'I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like'. Whether or not readers agree with the assessment, Emma endures as one of the strongest female characters to emerge from eighteenth-century English fiction. Sense & Sensibility, Pride & Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion are also published in the Penguin English Library.