Emma
Austen's most formally perfect novel. A young woman convinced of her matchmaking gift is, page by page, shown to be wrong about everyone — her friends, her suitors, herself. The free indirect style she pioneered is here at full power: you experience Emma's blind spots from inside them. Virginia Woolf called Austen the most perfect of artists, and Emma is the proof.
Austen predicted that nobody but herself would much like this heroine, and Emma labors to prove her right: a rich snob rearranging poorer people's lives for her own amusement. Nothing much happens, at considerable length. Miss Bates's monologues are tedious by design, which does not make them less tedious, and Knightley has been correcting Emma since her childhood before he marries her.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
