Miss Austen

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Miss Austen

By: Gill Hornby

Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson

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About this listen

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

Family Life

Genre Fiction

Historical Fiction

Women's Fiction

Fiction

Critic Reviews

A funny, warm and engaging novel

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. (CLAIRE TOMALIN)

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.’

Most relevant

Really enjoyed the book however I found the voice of Isabella and Mr Liddedale really annoying. I’m watching it on tv at the moment with Keely Hawes et al and loved the Performances. The reading is a bit overdone however it’s given me a wonderful insight into the life of the Austens.