Miss Austen

The Sunday Times bestselling novel that delves into why Cassandra burned a treasure trove of letters written by her sister, Jane Austen. Now a major series on BBC One and BBC iPlayer starring Keeley Hawes in 2025.

Throughout her lifetime, Jane Austen wrote countless letters to her sister. But why did Cassandra burn them all?

In 1840, twenty-three years after the death of her famous sister Jane, Cassandra Austen returns to the village of Kintbury, and the home of her family's friends, the Fowles. She knows that, in some dusty corner of the sprawling vicarage, there is a cache of family letters which hold secrets she can never allow to be revealed.

As Cassandra recalls her youth and her relationship with her brilliant yet complex sister, she pieces together buried truths about Jane's history, and her own. And she faces a stark choice: should she act to protect Jane's reputation, or leave the contents of the letters to go unguarded into posterity?

Based on a literary mystery that has long puzzled biographers and academics, Miss Austen is a wonderfully original and emotionally complex novel about the loves and lives of Cassandra and Jane Austen.