Just as an unedited email or fast tweet might came back to bite you today, letters in the nineteenth century (snail mail) could be documents of dread for the writer. Famously protective of her sister, Cassandra Austen burned all of Jane Austen’s correspondence after her death, spinning her own legacy for future Janeites, without contradictory proof available in writing. In Gill Hornby’s Miss Austen, the author offers a fictional spin on how those letters might have changed future generations’ perspective on a beloved author.
Cleverly combining well known facts of Jane Austen’s life with imagined secrets and opinions conveyed through private letters, the author offers an undocumented but very possible view of Jane Austen’s personal life. Alternating between Cassandra and Jane’s lives as young adults, secure in the family parsonage, and their later trials after their father dies, as unmarried women dependent on their brothers’ goodwill to house and support them, Hornby reveals women’s dependence on marriage to sustain them in that era. Jane, of course, became the exception, bringing in her own income as a writer and dying in her forties, but what fears and insecurities really haunted her?
Cassandra lost her opportunity for the good life when her fiancée Tom Fowles died before they could be married. Unlike her sister, she lives on into her sixties and in this story, she is visiting Tom’s family, in search of Jane’s old letters. She knows the letters reveal private details of both their lives as well as her sister’s moodiness; she remembers how scathingly critical of others Jane could be. In the wrong hands, Cassandra is convinced the letters will change the legacy of Jane Austen, and not for the better. Eventually, she finds the letters tied in blue ribbon. As Cassandra rereads the letters, she relives past moments of both their lives, wondering if she made the right choices, and finally revealing Jane behind the public facade.
The imagined lives are entertaining and charming, and Horby writes in the Jane Austen style of Regency era literary England, carefully giving the dialogue intelligence as well as wit. Fans of Jane Austen novels will appreciate the slow-moving narrative, with references to her novels as she wrote them.
Austen’s Persuasion has a special place in Hornby’s story, motivating me to reread this tale of renewed love after all seemed lost. In Miss Austen, Isabella finally finds happiness with a Doctor, only after her father, who thought him socially inferior, dies. Isabella is the niece of Cassandra’s late fiancé Tom Fowle. Isabella’s brother, a local clergyman has recently died, and she has to vacate the home she shared with him. Suddenly, Isabella seems without prospects or a place to live, and the correspondence hidden away for years will be unearthed with packing for the move out of the parsonage. Cassandra is visiting supposedly to help with the packing, but her real motivation is to find those letters. All ends well with Isabella marrying her secret love, and Cassandra finding the letters.
If rereading Jane Austen’s novels gives you some comfort these days, you might try Gill Hornby’s Miss Austen. The story can gently carry you back to Jane Austen’s time with a realistic twist and a few bon mots to sustain you.
And if you cannot get enough of speculating about Jane Austen, try:
Could it be Ann Landers and Abigail van Buren on the cover of Catherine Schine’s new novel about twins with extraordinary linguistic skills? The picture of the two wide-eyed twin girls on the cover could be any set of famous twins, but Daphne and Laurel Wolfe are the stars of The Grammarians and they share some of the idiosyncracies of the real Pauline Esther and Esther Pauline Lederer (better known as Ann and Abby) in an entertaining story about sibling rivalry and the power of words. 
The dictionary – Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition – enters the story early, offering a convenient source of reference as the girls grow, becoming a point of contention when their father dies, and finally bringing the twins back together in the end. This heavy tome placed on its stand, referred to as the “altar,” has all anyone needs to understand the story – “words, words, words, words” and the twins sometimes take it to bed with them.
Claire Lombardo’s family saga – The Most Fun We Ever Had – has all the drama of a television series (“This Is Us” comes to mind), as she follows the Sorensons through their lives. Although Marilyn Connelly and David Sorenson anchor the family with their seemingly perfect married life, and their unlikely unending passion, their dysfunctional daughters command most of the action. Lombardo uses the catalyst of a long lost teenager’s sudden appearance after having been secretly given up at birth for adoption, to explain the family dynamics.
If you are not hungry for pie and thirsty for beer as you read J. Ryan Stradal’s The Lager Queen of Minnesota, you are a better person than I am. After reading about Edith’s award winning pies, I had to take a break to buy and eat some pie. The craving for ale, lager. or stout was easy to overcome since the only beer I really like is Guinness and only if I am drinking it in Ireland – something about the water, I think, makes it taste so good there I could have it for breakfast. Luckily, I don’t get to Ireland often.
J. Courtney Sullivan’s Saints for All Occasions features two Irish sisters immigrated from Ireland. One joins a cloistered convent; the other marries and raises the nun’s out-of-wedlock son. Although their lives seem predictable, Sullivan uses their strict upbringing and their personal struggles to create a family saga across generations.
The No Charge Book Bunch 