Miss Austin

Jill Hornby

Throughout her life, 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 to the home of her family friends, the Fowles. She knows that, tucked away in a dusty corner of the sprawling parsonage, lies a cache of family letters holding secrets she can never allow to be revealed. As Cassandra recalls her youth and her relationship with her brilliant yet complicated sister, she pieces together buried facts about Jane's and her own history. She faces a difficult choice: should she act to protect Jane's reputation, or leave the contents of the letters unguarded for posterity? Based on a literary mystery that has long puzzled biographers and academics, Miss Austen is a brilliantly original and emotionally complex novel about the loves and lives of Cassandra and Jane Austen.