Review: Miss Austen
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars
Miss Austen tells the story of Jane Austen's beloved sister Cassandra Austen, who outlived Jane by some twenty-eight years. The sisters were, by all accounts, quite devoted to one another and Cassandra assiduously maintained Jane's reputation after her death, in part by famously burning a number of Jane's letters that Cassandra did not feel showed Jane at her best. (Jane Austen is known to have suffered from depression, in addition to her physical health problems.) This novel, which interweaves some of the social and family atmospheres that are at the heart of Jane Austen's best-loved novels with the actual Austen family. It offers an account of Cassandra's loss of her fiancé Thomas Fowle to yellow fever contracted while he was on a military expedition with his cousin Lord Craven, and how her promise never to marry another man was both a disaster and a success in that she lived on alone for some forty-eight years but had inherited a thousand pounds from him, affording her an unusual degree of independence for a single woman in that era. Cassandra moved a number of times in her life and shuttled back and forth between the family homes of her brothers, especially her brother Edward Austen Knight, whose wife Elizabeth bore him eleven children. In Miss Austen we see Jane's sister in her later years, when Cassandra partly used family visits as an opportunity to collect Jane's letters, partly curating the content that would be left to the world of her sister's musings. The descriptions of the Austen brother's family and cousin Eliza are poignant when viewed from the context of the letters that are extant.
While we know that Cassandra did indeed burn a number of Jane's letters, some of the content of the novel is theory, more than history. Well written, the novel is bold in that Jane Austen fans will take any novel dealing with their beloved authoress quite seriously. The tone of the novel is mostly pitch-perfect for Austen but I found myself oddly off-put by the fact so many elements of Austen's novels were woven into the story, even though I was amused by the reference to the fact that so many of Austen's great novels involved sisters rather than sisters and brothers, given that Jane and Cassandra had six brothers. The novel is a pleasant diversion, but I'll be curious to see the take of those who are die-hard Austenophiles.
Miss Austen is greatly enhanced in audiobook edition with the truly splendid narration of Juliet Stevenson.
I received a Digital Review Copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
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