Miss Austen
the #1 bestseller and one of the best novels of the year according to the Times and Observer
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3.6 • 14 Ratings
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
The Sunday Times bestselling novel, set to be a major TV drama series!
'So good, so intelligent, so clever, so entertaining - I adored it.' Claire Tomalin
'You can't help feeling that Jane would have approved.' Observer
'Celebrates unexamined lives, sisterhood and virtues such as kindness and loyalty' Sunday Times
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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.
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'The perfect book to wrap yourself around on a dark night' Stylist
'This is a deeply imagined and deeply moving novel' KAREN JOY FOWLER, author of The Jane Austen Bookclub
'It's a delight, one of those that you don't want to end.' RTE
'A charming novel' Sunday Mirror
'Hornby brings to life the Austen family, using the known to speculate on what might have been.' The Times Audio Book of the Week
'Extraordinary and heart-wrenching.' Lara Prescott
'Gill Hornby ingeniously imagines what Cassandra Austen's own life might have been like.' DEIRDRE LE FAYE, editor of Jane Austen's Letters
'Tender and touching' Daily Mail
'Utterly absorbing.' Artemis Cooper
'Delightful.' Sue Ryan, founder of Henley Lit Fest
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The third novel from Hornby (All Together Now) strikes gold in the much-mined terrain of Jane Austen inspired fiction. After Jane's death in 1817, her sister Cassandra "Cassy" Austen becomes a fierce protector of her literary reputation and remains so for decades. In March 1840, 67-year-old Cassy discovers that family friends the Fowles are moving out of their home in the village of Kintbury. Cassy, aware of a series of mischievous and moody letters Jane sent their friend Eliza Fowle, fears the letters might tarnish her sister's legacy if made public, so she travels to Kintbury to find them before they fall into the hands of the Fowle family historian. After sneaking into Eliza's room and reading the letters, Cassy revisits her own past, from the death of her fianc to her eventual role as the family's endlessly useful spinster aunt; Jane's shifting authorial fortunes; and the sisters' deep, enduring intimacy. While today's Jane-ites decry the real Cassandra's decision to burn much of Austen's correspondence, Hornby's Cassy is convincingly sympathetic in her effort to preserve her sister's reputation, and a focus on female relationships and mutual support adds unexpected tenderness. Echoing Austen's sardonic wit and crisp prose without falling into pastiche, Hornby succeeds with a vivid homage to the Austens and their world.
