Most funny to least (but still) funny:
Northanger Abbey
Pride and Prejudice
Sense and Sensibility
Emma
Persuasion
Mansfield Park
The Order in Which I Advise People New to Austen to Read Them:
Pride and Prejudice
Persuasion
Sense and Sensibility
Northanger Abbey
Mansfield Park
Emma
Best Romantic Leads, in Order of Best-ness:
Mr. Tilney
Captain Wentworth
Mr. Knightley
Mr. Darcy
Edward Ferrars
Edmund Bertram (Someone’s got to be last.)
Female Leads in Order of How Much I Would Probably Actually Like Them in Real Life, From Most to Least:
Marianne Dashwood
Anne Elliot
Elizabeth Bennet
Elinor Dashwood
Mary Crawford
Fanny Price
Emma Woodhouse
Catherine Moreland (This list was even harder than the men’s list. Really I like them all.)
The Jane Austen Project: A Novel 
I notice that Emma doesn’t really get a lot of love these days. I really love that novel, and I actually love Emma herself. Yes, she’s manipulative and a total snob, but she’s never dull!
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I love Emma too! Both the book and the character. She’s writing at the height of her powers here, with such a flawness expression of her particular genius that there is not a word out of place. I always think if EMMA was a garment, you could not find a seam. Perhaps this perfection itself can be a bit intimidating. On Persuasion (which I have to suspect she might have revised a bit more if she’d lived longer), though it’s also an amazing work, you can see the thumbprints a little.
But I would tell people to read it last not because it’s the least good, but because it is the most subtle. A good understanding of what Austen is up to makes the reader appreciate the full genius of Emma — not just a funny story about a small-town snob prone to self-deception (which it is) but also a meditation on the nature of fiction itself.
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Let’s spread the love for Emma!
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