Without romanticising its period setting or underplaying the precariousness of any woman’s position in this society, <b>it celebrates unexamined lives, sisterhood and virtues such as kindness and loyalty</b>.
SUNDAY TIMES
This is the <b>perfect book to wrap yourself around on a dark night</b>.
STYLIST
<i>Miss Austen</i> voices the (hitherto) shadowy figure of Cassandra, the villainies of the piece, and makes her flesh and blood…. <b>Gill</b> <b>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.</b>
THE TIMES
So good, so intelligent, so clever, so entertaining <b>– I adored it.</b>
- 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. <b>This is a deeply imagined and deeply moving novel. Reading it made me happy and weepy in equally copious amounts.</b>
- KAREN JOY FOWLER, author of THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB and WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES,
<i>Miss Austen</i> is <b>an ingenious imaginary explanation</b>of how so many of Jane’s letters came to be destroyed… With flashbacks and wonderful domestic detail, <b>Hornby brings to life the Austen family</b>, using the known to speculate on what might have been.
THE TIMES audio book of the week
<b>Extraordinary and heart-wrenching</b>, <i>Miss Austen</i> transported me from page one. <b>A</b> <b>remarkable novel</b> that is wholly original, deeply moving, and emotionally complex. <b>A gift to all Austen lovers</b>.
- LARA PRESCOTT, author of THE SECRETS WE KEPT,
<b>A delightfully astute re-imagining</b>… A persuasive picture of a brilliant woman who’s often derailed by her domestic duties but driven to write regardless.
WALL STREET JOURNAL
A<b> cleverly observed </b>fictional account of Jane Austen’s relationship with a sibling…<b>The great joy of <i>Miss Austen </i>is that the reader feels immersed in a world that is convincingly Jane’s from the first page</b>… 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… <b><i>Miss Austen </i>is a novel of great kindness, often unexpectedly moving, with much to say about the status of “invisible” older women. </b>Above<b> </b>all, it’s concerned with the triumph of small acts of goodness; you <b>can’t help feeling that Jane would have approved</b>.’
OBSERVER
A moving, often funny novel. <b>Richly imagined and spryly told</b>, it reinstates overlooked Cassandra as the most important person in Jane’s life, reimagining some of those lost letters as an added bonus.
MAIL ON SUNDAY