Recommendations
Books Like Emma
Best books to read after Emma by Jane Austen
Jane Austen's Emma is her most technically accomplished novel — Emma Woodhouse, the matchmaker who cannot see her own situation clearly. These recommendations continue the Austen canon, explore the classic British novel tradition, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the social comedy of manners centered on a heroine whose intelligence outstrips her self-knowledge.
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Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
The essential Austen companion — Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, Austen's most celebrated novel; shares Emma's social comedy, romantic misunderstanding, and heroine who must revise her initial judgments of the people around her.
- 2Buy
Persuasion
by Jane Austen
The final Austen companion — Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth's second chance, Austen's most emotionally direct novel; where Emma is comic, Persuasion is elegiac, but both turn on a heroine who must overcome the mistakes of the past.
- 3Buy
Mansfield Park
by Jane Austen
The serious Austen — Fanny Price at Mansfield Park, Austen's most morally rigorous heroine, the novel that most directly engages with questions of wealth, slavery, and the ethics of entertainment that Emma's comfortable world rests on.
- 4Buy
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
The great Victorian successor — Dorothea Brooke and Dr. Lydgate in the provincial town of Middlemarch, Eliot's novel sharing Austen's interest in a woman whose intelligence and aspiration are larger than the world available to her.
- 5Buy
The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
The American heir to Austen — Newland Archer in 1870s New York, Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel showing how the same social pressures that Emma navigates with comedy can destroy a life when they operate on a character without Emma's luck.
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Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
The great Victorian social comedy companion — Becky Sharp ascending and descending in Napoleonic England; where Emma is essentially sympathetic, Becky is not, and reading both shows the full range of what the social novel of manners can do.
- 7Buy
North and South
by Elizabeth Gaskell
The industrial-England companion — Margaret Hale moving from the rural south to the industrial north, Gaskell's novel of social adjustment sharing Austen's interest in a woman whose first impressions must be revised.
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Can You Forgive Her?
by Anthony Trollope
The Victorian Austen companion — Alice Vavasor in the first of Trollope's Palliser novels, the most consistently Austen-like of the major Victorian novelists in his comic social observation and his interest in women's choices within constrained circumstances.
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