The Sunday Times bestselling novel set to be a major TV drama series. '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
