The last, unfinished novel by S. Bronte (1816–1855) “Emma”, subsequently completed by another English writer, is published for the first time in Russian. “Reading this unfinished passage, I thought about everything that was left unwritten in it. Is it somewhere and if so, where? Will the last page open again, will the writer finish telling her story? Will she be able to correct this story about the troubles and anxieties of young Emma somewhere?” - so wrote Thackeray, publishing the last manuscript of his dearly adored Charlotte Brontë: two chapters from the novel “Emma” she began a few months before her cruelly early death. The questions he asked seemed quite rhetorical at that moment - it is obvious, however, that he was not the only one asking them. More than a hundred years have passed, and a completely different English writer, hiding under the pseudonym Another Lady (her real name is Constance Savery), tried to answer them, tried to “tell the story of young Emma” - thereby stretching a real thread from the 19th century to the 20th century. The novel “Emma” was published in London in 1980, another twenty years have passed, and now the Russian reader, and not of the 20th, but of the 21st century, will be able to find out its ending. A risky experiment, in which respect borders on audacity, and imitation is marked by the stamp of primordiality, turned out to be successful. The novel is easy to read, in one breath, you don’t feel any “seams” in it - this is the same novel about which Pushkin said: “The novel is a classic, ancient, excellently long, long, long.” At the same time, it is a novel that carries an attractive glow of “old times” - naturally and gracefully combined with a secret sad irony, this indispensable sign of “new” literature.