Miss Austen by Gill Hornby

Miss Austen
By Gill Hornby
Flatiron Books, 2020

Gill Hornby’s new novel Miss Austen is an elegant and involving book, but it carries a crushing burden. It’s set in the quiet country parishes of 19th century England, but underneath its crinoline and taffeta, it’s attempting to engage our tender sympathies for one of the greatest monsters in English-language literary history: Cassandra Austen. 

The Austen sisters were life-long confidantes. Cassandra must often have been the one listening ear for her passionate and voluble sibling. “To her alone did Jane Austen write freely and impulsively,” Virginia Woolf wrote over a century ago, “to her she must have expressed the hopes and, if the rumour is true, the one keen disappointment of her life; but when Miss Cassandra Austen grew old and suspected that a time might come when strangers would be curious about her sister’s private affairs, she burnt, at great cost to herself, every letter which could gratify their curiosity.” 

Woolf’s status as a literary critic is beyond reproach (in that same piece of writing about Jane Austen, she declares, “Arrange the great English novelists as one will, it does not seem possible to bring them out in any order where she is not first, or second, or third, whoever her companions may be,” and who can argue with that?), but even so, that “at great cost to herself” just boils the blood. Who the Hell cares if burning the vast trove of Jane Austen’s letters was a difficult thing for her sister to do? She had no right to do it at all. She had no right to do it at all. 

Jane Austen, who died in 1817, features prominently in Miss Austen, which is set in 1840 and dramatizes the later life of her sister Cassandra as she deals with the challenges of her changing circumstances and her desire to protect her sister’s posthumous privacy from the prying eyes of posterity. Hornby writes the period with considerable grace - Miss Austen is never anything but a delight to read on rhetorical level - but for passionate Janeites, it’s going to be difficult to refrain from chanting “She had no right” after virtually every page. No matter how compassionate a job Hornby does in fleshing out Cassandra Austen as a person, when her version of Cassandra sagely tells another character “Surely our history is all in our minds, in our memories. We can do no more than pass it on to the next generation, with as much honesty as we can muster,” even the village curate will hope Hornby then feeds her face-first into a wood-chipper.

The book is filled with glimpses of Jane as she passionately unburdens herself to Cassandra:

And what did I know? What did I know about love or any other matter?” Jane cried out. “In truth, I now look back on my erstwhile confidence and shudder at it. Before we left Steventon, I had no understanding of the world and its malice. The things I once wrote!” She put her face in her hands. “What a silly, silly, naive little child.” She thought for a moment. “This after all, need not be such a stretch of my so-called principles. I have always maintained the impossibility of love without money, but there must still be the hope that, with money, love can perhaps grow, over time.

All very evocative - and exactly the kind of thing Cassandra made sure would be lost to posterity. Cassandra Austen knew with perfect clarity that her sister belonged to all ages - she was the first to know it. The fact that she treated her sister’s letters as her own personal property is both a searing indictment and the very reason why there’s any artistic point to the informed guesswork of a book like Miss Austen. 

The book’s only genuinely irksome quality is its tendency - slight, tentative, but present even so - to void that indictment. It’s one thing to write a novel in the conviction that Cassandra Austen deserves consideration as a grieving and over-protective sister; it’s very, very much another thing to imply she was right to do what she did. But when Hornby presents one after another Jane Austen fan as dimwitted and entitled, what else could be implied? When Cassandra meets Mr. Dundas, the new vicar of Kintbury, we get a typical such exchange:

“Miss Austen?” Mr. Dundas bowed. “You are perhaps some relation to the actual Miss Austen - the great lady novelist?”

She agreed that she must be.

“Oh, but then this is a coincidence! For I am her greatest admirer.”

Cassandra proceeded to revise her opinion of the gentleman. There was clearly more to him than manners.

“Allow me, please, to kiss the hand that must once have touched our dear Jane. There. It as close [sic] as I will ever get to the real, proper thing.”

She rerevised it, immediately, and placed it back, firmly, into its original position.

Mr. Dundas goes on to say that “Mansfield House” is “my favorite above all,” and the reader just cringes - not only because Mr. Dundas is an idiot but because there’s an uncomfortable hint that they too might be idiots, that the whole of the coarse, clueless outside world never really deserved to know “the great lady novelist” any better than Cassandra wanted them to. 

Miss Austen is a moving portrait of Cassandra Austen but not a convincing one. Readers will come away feeling they know the whole extended Austen family more intimately than any biography could make possible, but Jane Austen fans will not forgive. And if Hornby’s next book is a sympathetic look at John Murray as he burns Lord Byron’s memoirs, well, it’ll be time to fire up the wood-chipper again. 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.