Miss Austen

The Sunday Times bestselling novel, soon to be 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
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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.
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'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