"A heroine whom no-one but myself will much like," the author famously proclaimed. In fact, in any league of likeability Miss Woodhouse is streets ahead of Miss Fanny - the ostentatiously "meek" heroine of Mansfield Park. Meek Emma is not. Indeed it is her sense of absolute sovereignty over her little world of Highbury - her right, as she presumes, to dispose of the marriage choices of those in her circle - which brings her to grief. And that grief,...