Miss Austen Review

In "Miss Austen" we revisit the family and friends of Jane Austen through the eyes of her sixty-year-old sister and dearest friend, Cassandra, who devoted herself to protect her sister's legacy by curating the family letters.

General Impressions

While "Miss Austen" can be read by die-hard Janeite's (the Jane Austen fandom) looking for more insight into Jane's life and books, you don't need to know anything about Jane other than the very basic to enjoy this story.

Jane Austen wrote about family, courting and marriage and at its heart, this is a book about all those subjects, with a special focus on spinsterhood.

The writing and language in this book might take some getting used to, especially if you are not used to reading historical novels or classics, but I enjoyed how it helped me immerse myself in the world and how much it reminded me of Jane's writing.

"Miss Austen" covers more than a decade in two different timelines through both Cassandra's eyes and her and Jane's correspondence, which sometimes contradicts Cassandra's words and even recollections. There is something that never wavers though: the love between Cassandra and Jane.

Marriage and Womanhood

As a woman of the time, no matter how much money your family had, the most important decision of your life would always be who to marry. More than happiness or love, marriage brought status, security and even freedom. Women didn't inherit so if anything happened to their father, they often found themselves in the street or depending on the charity of family or neighbours. If you were married, you had more people who could help you.

Once that choice is out of the way, you are dependant on your husband's whims. Even if he is kind and hard-working, he was still your lord and master and could decide to take you away from everything you knew and loved, forbid you from devoting time to your passions or belittling you in any other way. Violence, no matter how big or small could only be brushed under the rug because as a woman you needed your abuser to survive. If you enjoyed Bridgerton, you will recognize a lot of the same themes in this book.

Cassandra and Jane who choose to retain their identities through remaining single are then not only under a man's whim but also charity since they don't have a husband to provide or a pension to claim. They find themselves often in the company and living amongst other single women and if they find beauty and security amongst their own gender, not every woman is an ally in this book, often taking advantage of the patriarchal world they inhabit.

I admired Cassandra as a character: how self-assured, confident and smart she was but how that could also turn into stubbornness, arrogance and meddling. She could be a class A bitch and it took a lot to make her see herself as she was and not how she believed herself to be.

Miss Austen presents us with handfuls of women: married and unmarried, old and young, society and working class. Every single one of them presented us with a different path and a full inner life no matter if the people around them choose to see it or not. Not all of them were good, kind or choose to help their sisters but they all existed and deserve to be remembered for more than the man around them.

Thank you to Penguin and Arrow books for sending me this book

Rating: 4/5