MISS AUSTEN by GILL HORNBY

For those of us who adore Jane Austen and her novels, this fabulous book provides an answer to many questions, as well as opening fresh new perspectives on the author.

Jane Austen died young, leaving behind a small but utterly brilliant literary legacy. Her adoring, protective sister Cassandra has been criticised for destroying much of Jane’s correspondence after her death, and we have somehow felt “cheated” out of the extra insights into her life and her character these letters might have provided.

Enter Cassandra, the Miss Austen of Gill Hornby’s wonderful book.

Ms Hornby, skilfully interweaving history and her clever imagination, tells the story of how the now elderly and increasingly frail Cassandra tracks down letters that she feels might undermine her darling sister’s literary legacy. She worries that Jane’s witty nature, her sometimes waspish views of family and friends might cast her in a bad light.

Cassandra goes to stay at the vicarage where her late, long-dead fiancé Tom had grown up. Tom’s late sister-in-law Eliza had been a very dear friend to both the Austen sisters, and she suspects there may well be a cache of letters there.

Tom’s niece Isabella is in the process of moving out of the family home, following the death of her father, and Cassandra is caught up in a vortex of memories, recollections, amidst lots of skilful manoeuvring to outwit the domineering maid Dinah, and find the letters before the house is emptied.

She does indeed find letters, despite the machinations of a suspicious and borderline rude Dinah, and as she reads, she revisits her past.

There is a skilfully woven to-and-fro, reliving the lives and loves, the hopes and sorrows of the young Cassandra and Jane, as the old Cassandra reads and remembers.

There is a marvellous Jane Austen-y feel to so many of the characters that people this novel – they could all have walked out of the pages of one of Jane’s books.

A clever, intelligent, poignant book, with a clever twist at the end which I certainly didn’t see coming. It is funny at times, extremely moving at others, and downright fun most of the time.

Loved it.

PS: at the beginning of the book, there’s a list of the families in the novel – 3 families, all very intertwined thought marriage and friendship – and I found myself referring to it repeatedly, to check which niece was which, and which brother was which.