I recently finished reading EMMA by Jane Austen. Although I’d read her other novels, I don’t think I’d read this delight. The edition is a beautiful one with illustrations in an edition that belonged to my mother. The edition includes a reader’s guide that I read after completing the novel. It reminded me that Austen was born in 1775, she had little formal schooling, and that on the covers of her first books it said, “By a lady.” I smiled that the publisher stated that this edition had Austen’s portrait and the title “stamped in pure gold.”

I smiled from the first to last sentence of this book, at the sly way the author let the reader see what her lovely heroine Emma didn’t.