Miss Austen
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Narrated by:
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Juliet Stevenson
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By:
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Gill Hornby
About this listen
The Sunday Times bestselling novel, set to be a major TV drama
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'You can't help feeling that Jane would have approved.' OBSERVER
'So good, so intelligent, so clever, so entertaining - I adored it.' CLAIRE TOMALIN
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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.
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'The perfect book to wrap yourself around on a dark night' STYLIST
'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' SUNDAY TIMES
'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 Bookclub
'It won't surprise me if this is one of the books of the year. It's a delight, one of those that you don't want to end.' RTE
'A charming novel... capturing the spirit of the brilliant sardonic Jane, and reminding the reader of how brutal life was for women in Austen's era, it's an ingenious and affecting embroidery on the fact of the author's life.' SUNDAY MIRROR
'Miss Austen is ingenious ... With flashbacks and wonderful domestic detail, Hornby brings to life the Austen family, using the known to speculate on what might have been.' THE TIMES Audio Book of the Week
'Extraordinary and heart-wrenching, Miss Austen transported me from page one. A gift to all Austen lovers.' LARA PRESCOTT, author of The Secrets We Kept
'Gill Hornby ingeniously imagines what Cassandra Austen's own life might have been like, both before and after Jane's untimely death, casting a different light on the familiar biographical picture without in any way distorting it.' DEIRDRE LE FAYE, editor of Jane Austen's Letters
'Tender and touching ... Hornby deftly describes the psychological toll that such uncertainly took on Jane, and movingly celebrates the fortitude of Cassandra whose greatest love was her sister' DAILY MAIL
'Utterly absorbing. The lives of the Austen sisters are recreated with a brilliant sureness of touch that can only be achieved by deep study of the period.' ARTEMIS COOPER
'Delightful... It reads just like an Austen novel so you get the double whammy of being a new book with an old feel' SUE RYAN, founder of Henley Lit Fest
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The Complete Novels : Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Ever since Colin Firth's Mr Darcy emerged from the lake in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, the novels of Jane Austen have become more popular than ever, delighting millions of fans all over the world. Now, Alison Larkin's critically acclaimed narrations of Austen's six completed novels are brought together in this very special 200th anniversary audio edition. "Alison Larkin's narration will captivate listeners from the first sentence" raves AudioFile magazine about the Earphones Award-winning recording of Sense and Sensibility, which starts the collection.
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Table of Contents/Navigation Guide!
- By Jim on 02-23-18
By: Jane Austen
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The Women's March
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An enthralling historical novel of the woman’s suffrage movement inspired by three courageous women who bravely risked their lives and liberty in the fight to win the vote.
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Inspiring------and heart breaking.
- By tess pechka on 08-16-21
What listeners say about Miss Austen
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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- Fio Zacha
- 01-04-23
Superb!
A wonderful and moving book, beautifully narrated by Juliet Stevenson. A must for all Janeites and lovers of good writing and storytelling. Superb. Highly recommended.
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Overall
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- Shan Parfitt
- 05-15-24
Middling
It was interesting to imagine the missing parts of Austen's biography. The portrayal of her is a travesty though and the descriptions of her supposed depression are tedious.
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