Upon learning that George is in love with her versus the inferior Harriet, Emma condemningly thinks, “to see that Harriet’s hopes had been entirely groundless, a mistake, a delusion/that Harriet was nothing; that she was everything herself.”  (368).
Although Jane Austen’s book Emma was not intended to be an Elizabethan Tragedy like Shakespeare’s Hamlet; still, the fate of Emma Woodhouse is an extremely tragic one.  As this paper incessantly argues, Miss Woodhouse never can have true self-discovery until she meets with some real consequence for her self-deluded actions.