Inspired by a real-life literary mystery, Hornby’s deft reimagining of the relationship between Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra feels wonderfully authentic and absorbing. Taking the strange burning of the great author’s letters as a tantalising jumping-off point, Miss Austen blends period charm and sustained narrative tension to spellbinding effect.
Throughout her lifetime, Jane Austen wrote countless letters to her sister. But why did Cassandra burn them all?
1840: twenty three years after the death of her famous sister Jane, Cassandra Austen returns to the village of Kintbury, and the home of her family's friends, the Fowles. She knows that, in some dusty corner of the sprawling vicarage, there is a cache of family letters which hold secrets she can never allow to be revealed.
As Cassandra recalls her youth and her relationship with her brilliant yet complex sister, she pieces together buried truths about Jane's history, and her own. And she faces a stark choice: should she act to protect Jane's reputation, or leave the contents of the letters to go unguarded into posterity?
Based on a literary mystery that has long puzzled biographers and academics, Miss Austen is a wonderfully original and emotionally complex novel about the loves and lives of Cassandra and Jane Austen.
Publisher: Cornerstone
ISBN: 9781787462830
Number of pages: 416
Weight: 290 g
Dimensions: 197 x 128 x 25 mm
Without romanticising its period setting or underplaying the precariousness of any woman’s position in this society, it celebrates unexamined lives, sisterhood and virtues such as kindness and loyalty. - SUNDAY TIMES
This is the perfect book to wrap yourself around on a dark night. - STYLIST
Miss Austen voices the (hitherto) shadowy figure of Cassandra, the villainies of the piece, and makes her flesh and blood…. Gill Hornby is at her best describing the complex bonds between the “excellent women” of her story. She describes the horrors, but also the pleasures, of spinsterhood. - THE TIMES
So good, so intelligent, so clever, so entertaining – I adored it. - CLAIRE TOMALIN
Hornby's gift to the world of Austen lovers is to return to Cassandra her rightful recognition as Jane's most intimate and sustaining relationship, her greatest love. This is a deeply imagined and deeply moving novel. Reading it made me happy and weepy in equally copious amounts. - KAREN JOY FOWLER, author of THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB and WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES
Gill Hornby created a wonderfully researched and moving book which opens up a window in the lives of of the Austen sisters. After Jane Austen’s death, Cassandra burned much of their personal correspondence to keep the... More
This was a well researched novel focusing predominantly on the life of Cassandra Austen. As the keeper of Jane Austen’s legacy, we will discover so much more. With clear and emotional prose. We glance into the lives... More
Totally delightful, this reads like a Jane Austen novel in parts but perfectly captures the characters of Cassandra and her beloved sister. I loved how we are given glimpses of why Cassandra destroyed so many of... More
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