Miss Austen by Gill Hornby

For whoever looked at an elderly lady and saw the young heroine she once was?~from Miss Austen by Gill Hornby

I am old. I am older than my mother and her brothers and two grandfathers were when they died. I am two aunts away from being the eldest on my mother's side of the family, and an aunt and a cousin away from being the eldest on my father's side. I have become a living keeper of memories of times that predate most of my family's birth.

I am also the family genealogist, a role inherited from my grandfather along with his papers after his death. I know things. I know things no one else knows, things that I have kept mostly to myself. I debate about making public this knowledge but am reluctant to cast a dark shadow on the memory of beloved relatives.

I understand why Cassandra Austen was adamant about obtaining Jane's private letters, culling out those too personal, that revealed too much about her beloved sister's life. For as small a footprint as our lives may leave, some things should remain unknown, private, sacred.

And Cassandra saw now, understood for the first time, the immensity of the task she had lately set herself: How impossible it was to control the narrative of one family's history.~ from Miss Austen by Gill Hornby

Miss Austen is the story of an aging Cassandra Austen on a mission to retrieve her sister's letters from the estate of a beloved friend. For in these letters Jane had poured out her despair and depression following her father's retirement and later death, her hasty acceptance of the marriage proposal she soon broke, and the startling story of Cassandra's rejection of a marriage proposal, which had she accepted would have entailed breaking her vow to marry Tom Fowle or no man.

Church tradition allowed the relicts of the family two months to vacate the house for the next incumbent.(...)Poor Isabella. The task before her was bleak, miserable, arduous: just two months to clear the place that had been their home for ninety-nine years!~from Miss Austen by Gill Hornby 

Tom Fowle's family included three generations of clergymen who inhabited the vicarage, but the chain had ended. The widow of the last vicar, Isabella Fowle had to pack it all up, distribute family heirlooms to her brothers, and find herself a place to live--all in two months. The new vicar was pressing for an even earlier removal.

--to leave a vicarage was to be cast out of Eden. There were only trial and privation ahead.~from Miss Austen by Gill Hornby

Cassandra Austen arrives to 'help' out, but really to locate the letters she and Jane had sent to Isabella's mother Eliza, their dear friend.

The trip brings back memories. Tom was one of Rev. Austen's boarding scholars and had known Cassandra since she was a young child. When Cassandra agreed to marry him, he was impatient to gain a position to support them. When Lord Craven offered Tom a living if he accompanied him as his private minister to the Caribbean he readily agreed. Yellow Fever claimed his life.

Reading the letters she finds takes Cassandra back to when her family had to leave Stevenson. After their father's death, Jane and Cassandra and their mother had no permanent abode, little income, and no place for Jane to flourish and write her novels. Their society of beloved friends was replaced by a turnstile of acquaintances and vapid conversation.

Oh, how deeply I felt for these removals from a parsonage home! After the birth of our son, living in a parsonage became problematic for me. If anything happened to my husband, I had one month to move out! I had no job or income, a baby, a house full of belongings. It terrified me to know how vulnerable I was because of the parsonage system.

The scenes in Pride and Prejudice with Mrs. Bennett agonizing over the Collinses inheriting her home mirrors what Jane must have known, losing the only home she had ever known, the piano, the library, friends, everything that made life enjoyable.

Gill Hornby's portrait feels probable but upset me because I wanted Cassandra to have a happy ending, not the one she chooses.

Miss Austen is a dark novel, like Persuasion which Cassandra reads aloud in the book. Jane appears in flashback scenes with the wicked wit we love her for, but also in her darkest days, the Jane we would prefer to forget.

The coverlet made by Jane and Cassandra Austen and their mother

I also have to mention that during her visit to Manydown, Cassandra works on a patchwork quilt. With swollen fingers, she plied her needle intermittently.

I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Miss Austen: A Novel
by Gill Hornby
Flatiron Books
Pub Date 07 Apr 2020
ISBN 9781250252203
PRICE $26.99 (USD)