Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. Emma (1816), is Jane Austen's comic masterpiece in which Emma Woodhouse finds her match-making skills sadly misdirected as she learns humility and self-knowledge at the same time as she discovers love. Penelope Fitzgerald's most recent novel, The Blue Flower, was awarded the American National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1998.