Emma ( by Jane Austin)：How Jane Austen’s Emma changed the face of fiction

Emma, published 200 years ago this month, was revolutionary in its form and technique. Jane Austen's heroine is a self-deluded young woman with the leisure and power to meddle in the lives of her neighbours. The narrative was radically experimental because it was designed to share her delusions. Though little noticed by most of the pioneers of fiction for the next century and more, it belongs with the great experimental novels of Gustave Flaubert or James Joyce orVirginia Woolf. Woolf wrote that if Austen had lived longer and written more, “She would have been the forerunner of Henry James and of Proust”. In Emma, she is.