Gill Hornby’s novel ‘Miss Austen’ about Cassandra and Jane Austen, In conversation with Claire Armitstead

Based on a literary mystery that has puzzled biographers and academics, Gill Hornby’s Miss Austen is an original and complex novel about the loves and lives of Cassandra and Jane Austen.

Based in 1840, twenty-three years after the death of her famous sister Jane, when Cassandra Austen returns to the village of Kintbury, and the home of her family’s friends, the Fowles. She knows that, in some corner of the sprawling vicarage, there is a cache of family letters which hold secrets she is desperate should not be revealed. As Cassandra recalls her youth and her relationship with her sister, she pieces together buried truths about Jane’s history, and her own. After which she faces a stark choice: should she protect Jane’s reputation or leave the contents of the letters to go unguarded into posterity?