'3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on', Jane Austen wrote, in September 1814, to a niece with literary ambitions. The advice undoubtedly reflected Jane Austen's satisfaction with her own work in progress, a novel in which the village of Highbury provides the setting for the moral and emotional education of Emma Woodhouse, a heroine 'handsome, clever, and rich' but spoiled by 'the power of having rather too much her own way and a disposition to think a little too well of herself'.