I’m back again with more Austen readalikes, to go along with The Great Jane Austen Read Along hosted by The Austen Connection. Now, I am here to list book recommendations for Austen’s comedy of manners, Emma, if you are looking for more something similar.
A “heroine whom no one but myself will much like…” That is what Austen said when she started writing the beloved Emma, and it truly does ring true. Some readers struggle to warm up to Emma as a character. However, with its delightful humor and engaging (but also frustrating) heroine, you cannot help but find this engaging novel entertaining. You may be thinking that it would be difficult to find books that match the novel’s entertaining elements, but I believe I was able to come up with book recommendations that match this treasured novel’s themes. Hopefully, you will give them a try!
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Evelina by Frances Burney
Although this was a perfect read-alike for Northanger Abbey, I thought it would also be an ideal fit for Emma, as both heroines, Emma and Evelina, are naïve and try to navigate society. The fumbles that Evelina goes through similarly match Emma’s mistakes.
Frances Burney’s first and most enduringly popular novel is a vivid, satirical, and seductive account of the pleasures and dangers of fashionable life in late eighteenth-century London. As she describes her heroine’s entry into society, womanhood and, inevitably, love, Burney exposes the vulnerability of female innocence in an image-conscious and often cruel world where social snobbery and sexual aggression are played out in the public arenas of pleasure-gardens, theatre visits, and balls. But Evelina’s innocence also makes her a shrewd commentator on the excesses and absurdities of manners and social ambitions–as well as attracting the attention of the eminently eligible Lord Orville.
Evelina, comic and shrewd, is at once a guide to fashionable London, a satirical attack on the new consumerism, an investigation of women’s position in the late eighteenth century, and a love story. The new introduction and full notes to this edition help make this richness all the more readily available to a modern reader. (Credit: Oxford World’s Classics)
Get It At: Your local library | Project Gutenberg |LibriVox
The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox
Another title that matches up with Northanger Abbey, but with the melodramatic and comedic misunderstandings will be entertaining to read after Emma. Also, Charlotte Lennox was a particular favorite of Austen and heavily influenced her writing.
The Female Quixote, a vivacious and ironical novel parodying the style of Cervantes, portrays Arabella, the beautiful daughter of a marquis, whose passion for reading romances colors her approach to her own life and causes many comical and melodramatic misunderstandings among her relatives and admirers. Both Joseph Fielding and Samuel Johnson greatly admired Lennox, and this novel established her as one of the most successful practitioners of the “Novel of Sentiment.” (Credit: Oxford World’s Classics)
Get It At: Your local library | Project Gutenberg |LibriVox
My Lady Ludlow by Elizabeth Gaskell
Maybe Emma wasn’t your favorite character? Maybe you preferred the interactions of Miss Bates? The you will want to read My Lady Ludlow, a novella that dives in the daily lives of the Countess of Ludlow and the spinster, Miss Galindo.
My Lady Ludlow is a novel by Elizabeth Gaskell. It appeared in the magazine Household Words in 1858, and was republished in Round the Sofa in 1859, with framing passages added at the start and end. It recounts the daily lives of the widowed Countess of Ludlow of Hanbury and the spinster Miss Galindo, whose father was a Baronet, and their caring for other single women and girls. It is also concerned with Lady Ludlow’s man of business, Mr Horner, and a poacher’s son named Harry Gregson whose education he provides for. (Credit: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform)
Get It At: Your local library | Project Gutenberg | LibriVox
Miss Marjoribanks by Margaret Oliphant
Returning home to tend her widowed father Dr Marjoribanks, Lucilla soon launches herself into Carlingford society, aiming to raise the tone with her select Thursday evening parties. Optimistic, resourceful and blithely unimpeded by self-doubt, Lucilla is a superior being in every way, not least in relation to men. ‘A tour de force…full of wit, surprises and intrigue…We can imagine Jane Austen reading MISS MARJORIBANKS with enjoyment and approval in the Elysian Fields’ – Q. D. Leavis. Leavisdeclared Oliphant’s heroine Lucilla to be the missing link in Victorian literature between Jane Austen’s Emma and George Eliot’s Dorothea Brook and ‘more entertaining, more impressive and more likeable than either’. (Credit: Penguin Classics)
Get It At: Your local library | Project Gutenberg | LibriVox
Coelebs in Search of a Wife by Hannah More
In this, Hannah More’s only novel and an early nineteenth-century best-seller, More gives voice to a wealthy twenty-three-year-old bachelor, who styles himself “Coelebs” (unmarried), but seeks a wife. After the death of his father, Coelebs journeys from the north of England to London, where he encounters a fashionable array of eager mothers and daughters before he visits the Hampshire home of his father’s friend, Mr. Stanley. Lucilla Stanley, Mr. Stanley’s daughter, is both an intellectual and a domestic woman, and Coelebs’ ideal partner. In this intelligent novel about the meeting of two minds, More shows the ways in which a couple becomes truly “matched” as opposed to merely “joined.” (Credit: Broadview Press)
Get It At: Your local library | Project Gutenberg
And if you are looking for either retellings or contemporary titles, why not give these a try:
Kamila Knows Best by Farah Heron
Kamila’s life might not be perfect, but, whew, it’s close. She lives a life of comfort, filled with her elaborate Bollywood movie parties, a dog with more Instagram followers than most reality stars, a job she loves, and an endless array of friends who clearly need her help finding love. In fact, Kamila is so busy with her friends’ love lives, she’s hardly given any thought to her own . . .
Fortunately, Kamila has Rohan. A longtime friend of the family, he’s hugely successful, with the deliciously lean, firm body of a rock climber. Only lately, Kamila’s “harmless flirting” with Rohan is making her insides do a little bhangra dance.
But between planning the local shelter’s puppy prom, throwing a huge work event, and proving to everyone that she’s got it all figured out, Kamila isn’t letting herself get distracted–until her secret nemesis returns to town with an eye for Rohan. Suddenly, it seems like the more Kamila tries to plan, the more things are starting to unravel–and her perfectly ordered life is about to be turned upside down. (Credit: Forever)
Get it At: Your local library | Libro.fm
The Emma Project by Sonali Dev
No one can call Vansh Raje’s life anything but charmed. Handsome—Vogue has declared him California’s hottest single—and rich enough to spend all his time on missions to make the world a better place. Add to that a doting family and a contagiously sunny disposition and Vansh has made it halfway through his twenties without ever facing anything to throw him off his admittedly spectacular game.
A couple years from turning forty, Knightlina (Naina) Kohli has just gotten out of a ten-year-long fake relationship with Vansh’s brother and wants only one thing from her life…fine, two things. One, to have nothing to do with the unfairly blessed Raje family ever again. Two, to bring economic independence to millions of women in South Asia through her microfinance foundation and prove her father wrong about, well, everything.
Just when Naina’s dream is about to come to fruition, Vansh Raje shows up with his misguided Emma Project… And suddenly she’s fighting him for funding and wondering if a friends-with-benefits arrangement that’s as toe-curlingly hot as it is fun is worth risking her life’s work for. (Credit: Avon)
Get it At: Your local library | Libro.fm
Polite Society by Mahesh Rao
Beautiful, clever, and more than a little bored, Ania Khurana has Delhi wrapped around her finger. Having successfully found love for her spinster aunt, she sets her sights on Dimple: her newest, sweetest, and most helpless friend.
But when her aunt’s handsome nephew arrives from America, the social tides in Delhi begin to shift. Surrounded by old money and new; relentless currents of gossip; and an unforgettable cast of socialites, journalists, gurus, and heirs, Ania discovers that her good intentions are no match for the whims and intrigues of Delhi’s high society–or for her own complicated feelings toward her cherished childhood friend, Dev.(Credit: G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
Get it At: You local library | Libro.fm
The Ladies Rewrite The Rules by Suzanne Allain
Diana Boyle, a wealthy young widow, has no desire to ever marry again. Particularly not to someone who merely wants her for her fortune.
So when she discovers that she’s listed in a directory of rich, single women she is furious, and rightly so. She confronts Maxwell Dean, the man who published the Bachelor’s Directory, and is horrified to find he is far more attractive than his actions have led her to expect. However, Diana is unmoved by Max’s explanation that he authored the list to assist younger sons like himself who cannot afford to marry unless it’s to a woman of means.
She gathers the ladies in the directory together to inform them of its existence, so they may circumvent fortune hunters’ efforts to trick them into marriage. Though outraged, the women decide to embrace their unique position of power and reverse the usual gender roles by making the men dance to their tune. And together…the ladies rewrite the rules. (Credit: Berkley)
Get it At: Your local library | Libro.fm
Trouble by Lex Croucher
There’s a new governess at Fairmont House, and she’s going to be nothing but trouble.
Emily Laurence is a liar. She is not polite, she’s not polished, and she has never taught a child in her life. This position was meant to be her sister’s––brilliant, kind Amy, who isn’t perpetually angry, dangerously reckless, and who does (inexplicably) like children.
But Amy is unwell and needs a doctor, and their father is gone and their mother is useless, so here Emily is, pretending to be something she’s not.
If she can get away with her deception for long enough to earn a few month’s wages and slip some expensive trinkets into her pockets along the way, perhaps they’ll be all right.
That is, as long as she doesn’t get involved with the Edwards family’s dramas. Emily refuses to care about her charges – Grace, who talks too much and loves too hard, and Aster, who is frankly terrifying but might just be the wittiest sixteen-year-old Emily has ever met – or the servants, who insist on acting as if they’re each other’s family. And she certainly hasn’t noticed her employer, the brooding, taciturn Captain Edwards, no matter how good he might look without a shirt on . . .
As Fairmont House draws her in, Emily’s lies start to come undone. Can she fix her mistakes before it’s too late? (Credit: St. Martin’s Griffin)
Get it At: Your local library | Libro.fm
And if you are interested in seeing Emma as a detective, then try newest Austen continuation series!
Murder In Highbury by Vanessa Kelly
Less than one year into her marriage to respected magistrate George Knightley, Emma has grown unusually content in her newfound partnership and refreshed sense of independence. The height of summer sees the former Miss Woodhouse gracefully balancing the meticulous management of her elegant family estate and a flurry of social engagements, with few worries apart from her beloved father’s health . . .
But cheery circumstances change in an instant when Emma and Harriet Martin, now the wife of one of Mr. Knightley’s tenant farmers, discover a hideous shock at the local church. The corpse of Mrs. Augusta Elton, the vicar’s wife, has been discarded on the altar steps—the ornate necklace she often wore stripped from her neck . . .
As a chilling murder mystery blooms and chaos descends upon the tranquil village of Highbury, the question isn’t simply who committed the crime, but who wasn’t secretly wishing for the unpleasant woman’s demise. When suspicions suddenly fall on a harmless local, Emma—armed with wit, unwavering determination, and extensive social connections—realizes she must discreetly navigate an investigation of her own to protect the innocent and expose the ruthless culprit hiding in plain sight. (Credit: Kensington)
Get it At: Your local library | Libro.fm
That’s it for the Emma readalikes! Make sure to continue with the read along for more book recommendations!
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