A #1 International Bestseller “A deeply imagined and deeply moving novel. Reading it made me happy and weepy in equally copious amounts.” –Karen Joy Fowler “You can’t help feeling that Jane would have approved.” –The Guardian For fans of Jo Baker’s Longbourn, a witty, wonderfully original novel about Cassandra Austen and her famous sister, Jane. Whoever looked at an elderly lady and saw the … sister, Jane.
Whoever looked at an elderly lady and saw the young heroine she once was?
England, 1840. Two decades after the death of her beloved sister, Jane, Cassandra Austen returns to the village of Kintbury and the home of her family friends, the Fowles. In a dusty corner of the vicarage, there is a cache of Jane’s letters that Cassandra is desperate to find. Dodging her hostess and a meddlesome housemaid, Cassandra eventually hunts down the letters and confronts the secrets they hold, secrets not only about Jane but about Cassandra herself. Will Cassandra bare the most private details of her life to the world, or commit her sister’s legacy to the flames?
Moving back and forth between the vicarage and Cassandra’s vibrant memories of her years with Jane, interwoven with Jane’s brilliantly reimagined lost letters, Miss Austen is the untold story of the most important person in Jane’s life. With extraordinary empathy, emotional complexity, and wit, Gill Hornby finally gives Cassandra her due, bringing to life a woman as captivating as any Austen heroine.
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I have loved “Pride and Prejudice” and this book caught my eye. I enjoyed it immensely. The characters were wonderfully diverse and flawed. Jane’s letters were so believable! It was a pleasure to read.
This is a story of Cassandra Austen that is beautifully written by Gill Hornby. Through the letters we find the beautiful story of Cassandra’s life – I thought that Hornby did this story of Cassandra justice. The writing and imaginative prose was brilliant and very well executed to the time period of mid 1800’s decades after Jane’s death. I felt that I really learned a lot about their life and their love for each other as siblings. Hornby’s impeccable research on the minute details of their lives were evident in the pages and it was truly a delight to read. An homage and a gift to Austenites. I highly recommend this book that I loved and enjoyed thoroughly.
What a beautiful story of the love of family from Cassandra Austen’s point of view. What a difficult time for women, but the period has a lot to offer in the way of beauty and simplicity.
For whoever looked at an elderly lady and saw the young heroine she once was?~from Miss Austen by Gill Hornby
I am old. I am older than my mother and her brothers and two grandfathers were when they died. I am two aunts away from being the eldest on my mother’s side of the family, and an aunt and a cousin away from being the eldest on my father’s side. I have become a living keeper of memories of times that predate most of my family’s birth.
I am also the family genealogist, a role inherited from my grandfather along with his papers after his death. I know things. I know things no one else knows, things that I have kept mostly to myself. I debate about making public this knowledge but am reluctant to cast a dark shadow on the memory of beloved relatives.
I understand why Cassandra Austen was adamant about obtaining Jane’s private letters, culling out those too personal, that revealed too much about her beloved sister’s life. For as small a footprint as our lives may leave, some things should remain unknown, private, sacred.
And Cassandra saw now, understood for the first time, the immensity of the task she had lately set herself: How impossible it was to control the narrative of one family’s history.~ from Miss Austen by Gill Hornby
Miss Austen is the story of an aging Cassandra Austen on a mission to retrieve her sister’s letters from the estate of a beloved friend. For in these letters Jane had poured out her despair and depression following her father’s retirement and later death, her hasty acceptance of the marriage proposal she soon broke, and the startling story of Cassandra’s rejection of a marriage proposal, which had she accepted would have entailed breaking her vow to marry Tom Fowle or no man.
Church tradition allowed the relicts of the family two months to vacate the house for the next incumbent.(…)Poor Isabella. The task before her was bleak, miserable, arduous: just two months to clear the place that had been their home for ninety-nine years!~from Miss Austen by Gill Hornby
Tom Fowle’s family included three generations of clergymen who inhabited the vicarage, but the chain had ended. The widow of the last vicar, Isabella Fowle had to pack it all up, distribute family heirlooms to her brothers, and find herself a place to live–all in two months. The new vicar was pressing for an even earlier removal.
–to leave a vicarage was to be cast out of Eden. There were only trial and privation ahead.~from Miss Austen by Gill Hornby
Cassandra Austen arrives to ‘help’ out, but really to locate the letters she and Jane had sent to Isabella’s mother Eliza, their dear friend.
The trip brings back memories. Tom was one of Rev. Austen’s boarding scholars and had known Cassandra since she was a young child. When Cassandra agreed to marry him, he was impatient to gain a position to support them. When Lord Craven offered Tom a living if he accompanied him as his private minister to the Caribbean he readily agreed. Yellow Fever claimed his life.
Reading the letters she finds takes Cassandra back to when her family had to leave Stevenson. After their father’s death, Jane and Cassandra and their mother had no permanent abode, little income, and no place for Jane to flourish and write her novels. Their society of beloved friends was replaced by a turnstile of acquaintances and vapid conversation.
Oh, how deeply I felt for these removals from a parsonage home! After the birth of our son, living in a parsonage became problematic for me. If anything happened to my husband, I had one month to move out! I had no job or income, a baby, a house full of belongings. It terrified me to know how vulnerable I was because of the parsonage system.
The scenes in Pride and Prejudice with Mrs. Bennett agonizing over the Collinses inheriting her home mirrors what Jane must have known, losing the only home she had ever known, the piano, the library, friends, everything that made life enjoyable.
Gill Hornby’s portrait feels probable but upset me because I wanted Cassandra to have a happy ending, not the one she chooses.
Miss Austen is a dark novel, like Persuasion which Cassandra reads aloud in the book. Jane appears in flashback scenes with the wicked wit we love her for, but also in her darkest days, the Jane we would prefer to forget.
The coverlet made by Jane and Cassandra Austen and their mother
I also have to mention that during her visit to Manydown, Cassandra works on a patchwork quilt. With swollen fingers, she plied her needle intermittently.
I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.
As an Austen fan, I was looking forward to this book. I was not disappointed. A delightful look at Jane’s sister and other family dynamics. Some fun background details are suggested that makes the characters even more endearing.
A joy from the prologue to the author’s note. Rich in historical detail, family lore, and heart, Miss Austen will wow Janeites and enchant the uninitiated. Upon her sister’s death, Cassandra claimed that she was ‘the sun of my life.’ Now we know why.
Extraordinary and heart-wrenching, Miss Austen transported me from page one. A remarkable novel that is wholly original, deeply moving, and emotionally complex. A gift to all Austen lovers.
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.
Unputdownable. So good, so intelligent, so clever, so entertaining ― I adored it.
Since her sister’s death, Cassandra Austen has quietly and persistently done her best to preserve the reputation of Jane Austen. Despite the weariness of age, she travels to the home of her friends in search of letters her sister had written. In doing so, memories come to mind when Cassandra was the heroine of her own story.
This was an enjoyable read. It was interesting following Cassandra as she does her best to unobtrusively find letters in the home of her long-dead fiance. The story bounces between 1840 and when Cassandra was young. It shows how Cassandra may have viewed her talented sister.
I will admit I found the jumps between time to be a bit annoying. Mostly because I found what was happening in 1840 far more interesting than the “secrets” of Cassandra’s past. However, I did enjoy how fact was so expertly woven with fact.
For readers looking for a fictional look at the sister who survived Jane Austen, this would be an excellent choice. I received a free copy from NetGalley for reviewing purposes. All opinions expressed are my own.
Miss Austen by Gill Hornby is a delightful jaunt into the world of Jane Austen and her family told through this historical fiction novel.
The author takes what little we know in regards to the correspondence between Jane and her sister Cassandra, and weaves a lovely tail imagined of the interactions and love felt between sisters, family, and friends.
I love anything Jane Austen, and I was not disappointed in getting insight from a different angle into Jane’s life through her sister.
Excellent.
5/5 stars