Miss Austen cover art

Miss Austen

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Miss Austen

By: Gill Hornby
Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

The Sunday Times bestselling novel, soon to be 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?

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.

'You can't help feeling that Jane would have approved.' Observer
'So good, so intelligent, so clever, so entertaining - I adored it.' Claire Tomalin
'Celebrates unexamined lives, sisterhood and virtues such as kindness and loyalty' Sunday Times

© Gill Hornby 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

 Family Life Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Women's Fiction Fiction Heartfelt

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Barbara Pym: A BBC Radio Drama Collection cover art
The Echo of Old Books cover art
The Bronte BBC Radio Drama Collection cover art
Paper Cup cover art
Thornyhold cover art
Classic Romance cover art
The Darcy Monologues cover art
The Governess cover art
Persuasion cover art
The Color Purple cover art
The Air You Breathe cover art
Jane Eyre cover art
An Ivy Hill Christmas cover art
Nameless cover art
Speechless cover art
In Sickness and in Health cover art

Critic reviews

A funny, warm and engaging novel
Without romanticising its period setting or underplaying the precariousness of any woman’s position in this society, it celebrates unexamined lives, sisterhood and virtues such as kindness and loyalty.
This is the perfect book to wrap yourself around on a dark night.
Miss Austen voices the (hitherto) shadowy figure of Cassandra, the villainies of the piece, and makes her flesh and blood…. Gill Hornby is at her best describing the complex bonds between the “excellent women” of her story. She describes the horrors, but also the pleasures, of spinsterhood.
So good, so intelligent, so clever, so entertaining – I adored it. (CLAIRE TOMALIN)
Hornby's gift to the world of Austen lovers is to return to Cassandra her rightful recognition as Jane's most intimate and sustaining relationship, her greatest love. This is a deeply imagined and deeply moving novel. Reading it made me happy and weepy in equally copious amounts. (KAREN JOY FOWLER, author of THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB and WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES)
Miss Austen is an ingenious imaginary explanationof how so many of Jane’s letters came to be destroyed… With flashbacks and wonderful domestic detail, Hornby brings to life the Austen family, using the known to speculate on what might have been.
Extraordinary and heart-wrenching, Miss Austen transported me from page one. A remarkable novel that is wholly original, deeply moving, and emotionally complex. A gift to all Austen lovers. (LARA PRESCOTT, author of THE SECRETS WE KEPT)
A delightfully astute re-imagining… A persuasive picture of a brilliant woman who’s often derailed by her domestic duties but driven to write regardless.
A cleverly observed fictional account of Jane Austen’s relationship with a sibling…The great joy of Miss Austen is that the reader feels immersed in a world that is convincingly Jane’s from the first page… It’s testament to Hornby’s skill, then, that I had to turn to the author’s note at the back to check how many of the letters included here were invented. It’s also extremely funny; figures in Jane’s life who might well have provided models for some of her more bumptious, self-important characters are fleshed out here with a comic relish that feels entirely Austenian… Miss Austen is a novel of great kindness, often unexpectedly moving, with much to say about the status of “invisible” older women. Above all, it’s concerned with the triumph of small acts of goodness; you can’t help feeling that Jane would have approved.’
All stars
Most relevant
Not the kind of book I normally listen to, and enjoyed the change. Definitely in the style of the Austin books. It's a good story, I want to know which bits actually happened.

Continues the style of the Austin stories

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
What a wonderful book... so beautifully read by Juliet Stevenson. Such love for the female characters by the author... such insight into the strengths and weaknesses we all have. Made me feel so proud of the main female characters in the book. Loved it.

Absolute delight

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Juliet Stevenson is a triumph. Every character came alive. I had a lot of interruptions during the listening of this book. I may come back to it another time.

Wonderful characters

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Not as rich and witty a storyteller as Jane Austen, but as Casandra’s story, it rings true. Written with a love and respect that can hold no fears for those who cherish the work and life of Jane Austen.

Pitch Perfect and the private story that rings true to me.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I am an ardent fan of anything Austen and that helped keep me motivated to listen, especially when the plot was confused by the flashbacks to precious time periods and when dear Juliet Stevenson’s performance was a little bit over the top for my liking! I was however thoroughly invested in the characters and keen to persevere. I think a second listening will help me to enjoy the novel more, now that I understand the two different time periods and their significance and I intend to begin immediately.

I love anything Austen!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews