Gill Hornby

Juliet Stevenson

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Miss Austen

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.

This is the perfect book to wrap yourself around on a dark night.

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.

So good, so intelligent, so clever, so entertaining – I adored it.

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

Miss Austen is an ingenious imaginary explanationof how so many of Jane’s letters came to be destroyed… With flashbacks and wonderful domestic detail, Hornby brings to life the Austen family, using the known to speculate on what might have been.

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.

LARA PRESCOTT, author of THE SECRETS WE KEPT

A delightfully astute re-imagining… A persuasive picture of a brilliant woman who’s often derailed by her domestic duties but driven to write regardless.

A cleverly observed fictional account of Jane Austen’s relationship with a sibling…The great joy of Miss Austen is that the reader feels immersed in a world that is convincingly Jane’s from the first page… It’s testament to Hornby’s skill, then, that I had to turn to the author’s note at the back to check how many of the letters included here were invented. It’s also extremely funny; figures in Jane’s life who might well have provided models for some of her more bumptious, self-important characters are fleshed out here with a comic relish that feels entirely Austenian… Miss Austen is a novel of great kindness, often unexpectedly moving, with much to say about the status of “invisible” older women. Above all, it’s concerned with the triumph of small acts of goodness; you can’t help feeling that Jane would have approved.’

A moving, often funny novel. Richly imagined and spryly told, it reinstates overlooked Cassandra as the most important person in Jane’s life, reimagining some of those lost letters as an added bonus.

In this subtle and delicate novel, Gill Hornby has created a clever, warm hearted character in Cassandra, Jane Austen’s sister.

Miss Austen is both complicit in and a sly comment on our obsession with the novelist’s life and contested mental state, and it burns, too, with sympathy for the women forced to carve out different sorts of lives at a time when marriage was considered the only index of their worth.

Jane Austen’s sister Cassandra takes centre stage in this engrossing novel that portrays what 19th Century life was like for an unmarried woman of limited means.

Gill Hornby ingeniously imagines what Cassandra Austen's own life might have been like, both before and after Jane’s untimely death, casting a different light on the familiar biographical picture without in any way distorting it.

DEIRDRE LE FAYE, editor of JANE AUSTEN'S LETTERS

Miss Austen is affecting, thought-provoking, and makes you think about both the Jane and Cassandra Austen in a new light.

HELENA KELLY, author of JANE AUSTEN, THE SECRET RADICAL

A charming novel… capturing the spirit of the brilliant sardonic Jane, and reminding the reader of how brutal life was for women in Austen’s era, it’s an ingenious and affecting embroidery on the fact of the author’s life.

A pitch perfect novel, fond and atmospheric. It reads as if Gill Hornby was born to write Cassandra’s story, and she brings her whole witty and sympathetic self to the task.

Utterly absorbing. The lives of the Austen sisters are recreated with a brilliant sureness of touch that can only be achieved by deep study of the period.

Gill Hornby weaves a magnificent work of the imagination, a pastiche of Regency style and manners, fabricating a solution to a problem that has long mystified scholar . . . Hornby’s portrayals of Cassandra and Jane are tantalising . . . All devotees of Austen’s novels will want to join Hornby, and Cassandra, in this enjoyable act of piety to Jane.

Austen aficionados have looked askance at Cassandra’s wilful destruction of her famous sibling’s letters, but here, in a tender and touching recreation of their relationship, the (imagined) correspondence is the key that unlocks the plot... Hornby deftly describes the psychological toll that such uncertainly took on Jane, and movingly celebrates the fortitude of Cassandra whose greatest love was her sister.

A wonderfully original, emotionally complex novel that delves into why Cassandra burned a treasure trove of letters written by her sister, Jane Austen – an act of destruction that has troubled academics for centuries.

A beguilingly persuasive book that no Austen fan will want to miss.

A beautifully wrought drama that find Cassandra, now an elderly spinster, looking back on the life they shared. Utterly charming.

Fans will delight in this new novelby Gill Hornby, which ingeniouslyimagines what Jane’s sister Cassandra Austen’s own life might have been like.

This complex story reveals a clever and warm-hearted character in Cassandra, and brings us closer to one of the greatest of all English writers.

A novel that will delight Pride and Prejudice fans.

This is an engaging story about love, loss, and finding one's place in the world. A must-read for Jane Austen fans.

Through her spry, witty portrait of Jane Austen’s sister, Hornby mounts a lively defence of single women’s liberty.

Fans of Pride and Prejudice and Emma will enjoy this touching story[…] In her meticulously researchedthird novel, Gill Hornby skilfully imagines the correspondence between the sisters.

Hornby does amazingly well in the riskiest area of all, the invention of letters ostensibly written by Jane […] The television rights to this novel were sold at birth. No surprise: the dialogue is ready to roll […] People are going to love it, but I wonder if any screen adaptation will be able to convey the hidden treasure within this thoughtful story.

‘It won’t surprise me if this is one of the books of the year, it’s a delight, one of those that you don’t want to end.’

Many of the themes familiar from Austen’s novels are deftly revisited by Hornby, and the letters that are reimagined are pitch-perfect, with deeply touching confidences shared in family correspondences. You can tell this book by its cover – it’s quite lovely.

Beautiful novel[…] light hearted historical fiction which resembles Austen’s novels, a really lovely read very suitable for incoming spring’

Gill Hornby unfolds it all in her imagination.

Hornby combines a moving portrait of sisterly devotion with a comic depiction of the provincial life so brilliantly evoked in Austen's own novels

[A]t the heart of it all there's a romantic twist..."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"

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
The Sunday Times bestselling novel, soon to be a major series on BBC One and BBC iPlayer starring Keeley Hawes in 2025. 
 
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. 
 
'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 
 
© Gill Hornby 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

A wonderfully original, emotionally complex ‘reading-group’ novel that delves into why Cassandra burned a treasure trove of letters written by her sister, Jane Austen – an act of destruction that has troubled academics for centuries.

The Sunday Times bestselling novel, set to be a major TV drama 
________________________ 
'You can't help feeling that Jane would have approved.' OBSERVER 
 
'So good, so intelligent, so clever, so entertaining - I adored it.' CLAIRE TOMALIN 
________________________ 
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 
 
'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 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 Bookclub 
 
'It won't surprise me if this is one of the books of the year. It's a delight, one of those that you don't want to end.' RTE 
 
'A charming novel... capturing the spirit of the brilliant sardonic Jane, and reminding the reader of how brutal life was for women in Austen's era, it's an ingenious and affecting embroidery on the fact of the author's life.' SUNDAY MIRROR 
 
'Miss Austen is ingenious ... With flashbacks and wonderful domestic detail, 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, Miss Austen transported me from page one. A gift to all Austen lovers.' LARA PRESCOTT, author of The Secrets We Kept 
 
'Gill Hornby ingeniously imagines what Cassandra Austen's own life might have been like, both before and after Jane's untimely death, casting a different light on the familiar biographical picture without in any way distorting it.' DEIRDRE LE FAYE, editor of Jane Austen's Letters 
 
'Tender and touching ... Hornby deftly describes the psychological toll that such uncertainly took on Jane, and movingly celebrates the fortitude of Cassandra whose greatest love was her sister' DAILY MAIL 
 
'Utterly absorbing. The lives of the Austen sisters are recreated with a brilliant sureness of touch that can only be achieved by deep study of the period.' ARTEMIS COOPER 
 
'Delightful... It reads just like an Austen novel so you get the double whammy of being a new book with an old feel' SUE RYAN, founder of Henley Lit Fest

Miss Austen

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