The eighty-seventh book: #72 Emma - Jane Austen
After Mansfield Park, Emma, the protagonist this book is obviously named after, suits me a lot better. She's active and strong willed, she drives the action and she's flawed - for the purposes of this book and in comparison to the era, very flawed. She enjoys playing matchmaker, but it shown several times to be bad at it, leading to some unsatisfactory unions and others avoiding her attention or work to get their own way. She fails, she's flawed, and while it gets tricky to keep up with the characters flying around sometimes, on the whole it's nice to see it all play out with our protagonist in the middle.
Jane Austen set out to write a character, she said, that no one but herself would really like and while I think that description goes a bit far, the fact that she isn't as easy to love makes her a more interesting character that really stands inside the world, rather than above it. Through it you get other characters around her, not straight villains and heroes, but other complex characters that the novel can explore more freely. It's an empowering story in that sense, and feels like a highlight of these romance novels so far.