Product Description
Miss Austen
Author: Gill Hornby
Format: Paperback
NOW A MAJOR SERIES ON BBC ONE AND BBC iPLAYER STARRING KEELEY HAWES IN 2025
'You can't help feeling that Jane would have approved' — Observer
'So good, so intelligent, so clever, so entertaining - I adored it' — Claire Tomalin
'Celebrates unexamined lives, sisterhood and virtues such as kindness and loyalty' — Sunday Times
'Sparkling novel' — Daily Mail
'I read the book and laughed and sobbed' — Keeley Hawes
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.
'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, author of The Secrets We Kept
'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
Loved Miss Austen? Check out Gill Hornby's wonderful new novel, The Elopement!
About the Author
Gill Hornby is the author of The Hive and All Together Now, as well as The Story of Jane Austen, a biography of Austen for younger readers.
Her subsequent novels, Miss Austen and Godmersham Park were Sunday Times bestsellers, and Miss Austen is a four-part BBC adaptation starring Keely Hawes as Cassandra Austen. She is also the President of the Jane Austen Society. She lives in West Berkshire with her husband and four children.
For custom orders and quotes: shop@schoolspace.co.za
© 2026 Schoolspace. This product description is the exclusive intellectual property of the publisher, protected under copyright law. Unauthorized use, adaption, or copying is strictly prohibited.
