Emma is the most intricate, stylish, and elegant of Jane Austen's novels. Through a concentration on the perspective of the heroine, through internal monologue, and through the most complex use of free indirect speech, the reader is forced to identify with a character displaying Lydia Bennet's ‘hurtful degree of self-consequence’; Austen wrote that Emma is a heroine ‘no one but myself will much like’ (Memoir, p. 119). Unlike the heroines that precede and follow her, she is little occupied with her motives and memory or with past events; being a plotter, she naturally looks to a future she expects to control – as it turns out, a futile endeavour, frequently hurtful to the unwitting pawns in her fantasy dramas. That the overall effect of the book is comic rather than cruel is due in part to the narrative techniques and in part to the sheer linguistic vitality of the fictive world, coupled with the attractive energy of the heroine. It is as if Jane Austen, having just insisted on her readers' appreciation of the weak, inhibited Fanny Price, dares us to accept a rescue of Mary Crawford, another woman with a ‘lively mind’ and a desire to act with something of a man's freedom, and to see in her a resemblance to the approved Elizabeth Bennet after all. The title page reads ‘by the author of “Pride and Prejudice”’, not Mansfield Park, the previous novel.