Emma is a novel written by Jane Austin, a prestigious female writer. It tells the story of how a girl called Emma finds her true love. She was a celibatarian who loved to be the matchmaker for other people for fun. Although she had actually succeeded for several times, it was not considered to be a very inappropriate during the early nineteenth century in England to behave this way in her spare time.  Although Emma broke the customary behavior of most women and was determined to help others find their true love, she, herself, gradually realized that her true love was right in front of her.

Besides Emma, I’ve read Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, which is another famous novel surrounding that time period. In this novel, the main character, Elizabeth, was a clever and warm hearted girl. She insisted on her own opinions though sometimes she might be wrong. Similarly, Emma had qualities and characteristics like Elizabeth’s. For instance, she was smart, outgoing and had her own strong will. Both Elizabeth and Emma were from a family of high circumstance. They were well educated but followed their hearts. The two characters portrayed symbolize the elegance of women, and how they existed to show that they have the power to make a living by themselves. Obviously, they found true love in the end. This tells us that Jane Austin herself looked forward to such courage in women but still believed in romance.
    

In these two books by Jane Austin, the readers recognize that the two characters, Emma and Elizabeth, were breaking barriers for women. At that time, when a girl was married, she had to change her last name into her husband’s. A very interesting thing I found was that in the book Emma, when Emma’s good friend, as well as her “teacher”, Miss Taylor was married to Mr.Weston, she was called as “Mrs. Weston” throughout the whole book. This shows the tradition of that time and the kind of characters these women played that was different from most women of the time period.