Written, Adapted and Edited By Ken Everett
This is an epic tale of families, and a comedy of manners of middle-class life in the historic 19th century society. The heroines come to see themselves and their conduct more clearly, and become better, more moral people. We can identify with them and understand the emotions tied to them. Their misguided attempts at love, and the distinctions between money and class. We can connect to the tension between class, love, and family as well as the struggle between choosing one's own path while still meeting societal expectations. It is not mere romances. Ironic, comic, and wise, it is masterly study of the society.
The death of their father leaves his three daughters, Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret, and his widowed wife out of his inheritance, the four ladies move out of his estate and into their own modest house. With a new life opens up new worlds. The girls meet many new characters and soon develop their own unique personalities as they mature from adolescents into young women.
A headstrong Elizabeth self-assurance comes from a keen critical mind and is expressed through her quick-witted. Because of her exceptional powers of observation, Elizabeth's sense of the difference between the wise and foolish, for the most part, is very good. Her confidence in her own discernment is what leads her into her worst errors.
Catherine, a young and naive young woman on her journey to a better understanding of the world and those around her. She discovers that she differs from those other women who crave wealth or social acceptance, as instead she wishes only to have happiness supported by genuine morality. Many of her problems stem from her excessive tendency to take people at their own evaluations; Catherine also has an underlying sense of reality to support her; and her honesty and strength eventually see her successfully through her troubles.
An impoverished Fanny is mentally and physically fragile, a vulnerable little girl with low self-esteem and emotionally thin-skinned. The strength that has enabled her to survive is the love of her brother William. She is sent to live with her wealthy aunt and uncle at their estate. In each stage of life, from the age of 10 to adolescence to young adulthood, she encounters a number of people pursuing wealth, status, or pleasure at any cost. She sees very little redeeming qualities in such pursuits, but will her experiences out in the real world lead her to believe that marrying for these underlying conditions supersede marrying for love and happiness?
Emma is a handsome, clever, and rich. We follow her slow and bumpy growth from self-deception to self-knowledge. After having attended a wedding of a close friend, has decided that she is the primo matchmaker in all of England. She forges forward, headstrong, into setting up couples she believes should be together. Her youthful hubris creates an overconfidence in her matchmaking skills, and her meddling in other people's lives soon begins to have unexpected, and at times outrageous, outcomes.
Anne, a young woman, is the overlooked middle daughter. Her mother is dead; her father and older sister are vain and selfish; and her younger sister is a manipulative hypochondriac but not quite so beyond Anne's influence as her elder sister Elizabeth. With few to appreciate her sweet nature and refined, elegant mind, Anne is somewhat isolated, living in a narrow social sphere where she "was nobody with either father or sister; her word had no weight; her convenience was always to give way; she was only Anne."