This script has been lightly edited for clarity

Jace Lacob: I’m Jace Lacob and you’re listening to MASTERPIECE Studio.

Miss Austen begins on a gray day, like any other in the 19th century English countryside. Cassandra Austen gets dressed and begins her morning chores. Cassandra’s life is one of routine in her little garden and around her little village, particularly after the death of her sister, the celebrated author Jane Austen, for whom Cassandra served as best friend, caretaker, and confidante. But as she’s feeding the hungry goats, this seemingly typical day takes an unexpected turn.

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Nancy: A letter, Miss Austen. From Kintbury.

Cassandra: Kintbury?

Isabella: My dear Cassandra, I am writing to inform you that my father, Fulwar, has only a short time left with us.

Cassandra: It’s the reverend Fowle, he’s dying.

The letter was sent by Isabella Fowle, daughter of the Reverend Fulwar Fowle. The Austens and the Fowles have been intertwined for decades, as Fulwar Fowle was married to Jane and Cassandra Austen’s cousin, Eliza. Isabella writes that her father is close to death, news which strikes a devastating blow to Cassandra. Despite Isabella’s urging Cassandra to stay put, she packs her bags and heads to Kintbury to see the reverend one last time.  

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Fulwar: Now you’re here you must do something for me. Promise me.

Cassandra: What?

Fulwar: Isabella must live with her sisters. Promise me.

Cassandra: Worry not. There is no greater comfort in this world than a sister.

The next morning, news of the reverend’s passing casts a dark shadow over the vicarage. Not only has Isabella lost a father, but she must now vacate her home as the new vicar, Mr. Dundas, is looking to move in straightaway. Meanwhile, Isabella’s aunt, Mary Austen, who was Eliza’s sister, decides her son should write a biography of the Austen family. And to do so, he’ll need the letters that Jane and Eliza wrote to each other. 

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Mary Austen: I must instruct Isabella not to remove any of my sister’s private correspondence. I will take care of that. There are sure to be letters in Eliza’s room that will cast up all manner of treasure. After all, Jane and Eliza corresponded vigorously. As did you and Eliza, if I recall.

Cassandra: Surely you don’t intend to do this now my dear. After all, the day has been trying enough.

But for Cassandra, it would be a disaster to Jane’s literary and personal legacy if these letters were to make their way into Mary’s hands. 

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Mary: Dinah says you’ve made a start on clearing my dear sister’s room.

Cassandra: You know I wish to help.

Mary: Did you find any letters from Jane?

Cassandra: Not a single one.

Mary: How odd considering how often Jane wrote.

Author Gill Hornby joins us today to discuss how she crafted the rich and mysterious world of her novel, Miss Austen, and the redemption of Cassandra Austen.

Jace Lacob: This week we are joined by Miss Austen author Gill Hornby. Welcome.

Gill Hornby: Thank you for having me.

Jace Lacob: So before we delve into Miss Austen, I am curious about your personal relationship with Jane Austen before writing the story of Jane Austen and Miss Austen. What was your first experience reading Jane Austen’s work?

Gill Hornby: Well, my first experience was at school and I was 16. I’d been a pretty terrible student until that moment, and then I had one of those English teachers that come along and change your life, and she came along and changed my life and she did it via Jane Austen. We were having to do Mansfield Park, but she singled me out to read all the rest of the Austens and to stay behind after school and discuss them with her. She civilized me really, through the works of Jane Austen. I think it was her sort of channel into this wayward child and turned me into something that I hadn’t been before.

But I didn’t engage with the life at all, I obviously adored the novels, but I didn’t engage with the life at all until I was in my thirties and we moved to this house in the village of Kintbury, and I was told that there was a Jane Austen connection, and the connection actually turned out to be her sister Cassandra, who had been engaged to the son of the house, the vicarage in which we were living, and that that engagement had ended in tragedy.

And she began to haunt me, Cassandra, not Jane, actually, began to haunt me because I’ve always been fascinated by those women in the 18th and 19th centuries. Their futures were marriage and children and a home, and then they had that ripped away from them, and how did they invent the rest of their lives? How did they improvise having a life after that with any kind of security? Because this was before in Britain, the Married Women’s Act, and so women had no right to their own money at all. So, I began to think of her. I knew that she had been staying in our house and her first Christmas away from the Austens. It was the first time her sister Jane had written to her because it was the first time they’d ever been apart. And then she had to kiss goodbye to her fiance at the gate before dawn one January morning and then never saw him again.

And so she really haunted me. Whenever I walked through the gate, I thought of her. I was purely by chance then commissioned to write a biography of Jane Austen for children for eight to 12 year olds. So I first read the biographies and was astonished to find that none of the biographers like Cassandra. She was terribly unpopular because she destroyed so much evidence of Jane’s life after Jane’s death.

Then I read the memoirs of the nieces and nephews of the two. They’re all about how Jane was a sparkling genius creature, and Cassandra was just a dry old stick. So I was sort of a bit affronted. Then I read Jane’s letters that we do have, which are mostly to Cassandra and saw a completely different side to it. I saw that Jane adored her. Not just adored her, but was dependent on her. She wouldn’t trim a bonnet without asking Cassandra’s opinion. And then towards the end of her life when Jane became mysteriously ill, she became very emotionally dependent on Cassandra.

There’s one thing where Cassandra’s been called away to look after some other hypochondriac relative when she’d much rather be looking after Jane, and Jane writes to soothe her saying, “Please don’t worry about me. I was ill at the time of your going, purely from the fact of your going.” And I thought that was so moving. And then Jane died in her arms.

And so I thought, if Jane had adored her, then I can carry on adoring her. And also I became then sort of furious about the way she’d been treated by everybody else. And so it brewed in my head that I really wanted to make the case for her. We know so little about either of them really, that it seemed to me the only way it could be done was in fiction. It took me a while to get up the nerve to do it, but really, it’s a kind of propaganda work of the case for Cassandra Austen and why actually, she’s great and we all ought to be on our knees with gratitude because she did so much for Jane.

Jace Lacob: As you mentioned earlier, you live in Kintbury in a former vicarage on the side of the house where Tom Fowle, Cassandra Austen’s fiance was once lived, and you walk through Austen family history essentially every day looking at the same garden and views that Jane and Cassandra would have. How did that help to inspire you to write Miss Austen?

Gill Hornby: Oh, it was marvelous. I mean, there’s quite a lot of research to be done when you’re writing historical novels, obviously, and it’s not my favorite bit of the whole process. And what was so great about Miss Austen was basically, I was setting 75% of the novel in my own backyard. So, whenever I was slightly stuck for inspiration, I had to look out the window. That was very relaxing. But it did add a certain something as well because I could recreate the village and the way it slotted in the facts of village life, which were quite easy to trace.

In the series, there’s a daughter called Isabella, who is unmarried and her father’s just died, and she’s been turfed out of her house very much like Jane, has nowhere to go, is looking at hideous insecurity. But unlike Jane, does have a quiet secret love that her father had always forbidden. And all of those people are buried in the church yard. Really, all of the characters that are in the TV series, they’re all there and I walk past them every day. I do often think about what their reaction would be to what’s been going on, because it’s been very, very widely viewed, and to my great gratification, enjoyed.

Jace Lacob: The letters within Miss Austen are entirely imagined as Cassandra burned the majority of the confidential letters that she found. About 160 of Jane’s letters, most to Cassie, survived. How did those letters help you to recreate Jane’s voice in these fictionalized letters, a voice that’s far more casual than her other writing?

Gill Hornby: Yes well, it helped me create her voice generally, actually, because I sat down with this lofty ambition of defending Cassandra. I’d never written a historical novel before. I’d written two contemporary social comedy things, but I hadn’t had the courage to get going on this. I wanted to do this one next. I didn’t have any other idea and my publisher said no, thank you. So I thought, well, I’m just going to get on with it on my own, because I’ve just got to get it out of my system.

And I sat down to write it and there was Cassandra trotting about the place. And then of course it suddenly occurred to me that Jane had to do exactly the same and I couldn’t put off her entry. And I kept putting it off and kept putting it off. And then I’d write, then she’d have to turn up and I’d write some things, die of embarrassment, scratch it out, walk the dog. And then I went back to the letters, and they were such a release because the first one that she writes to Kintbury actually, I paraphrase, she writes, I think I’m beginning to get the hang of this letter writing business. You just write to the person as if they’re sitting in the armchair opposite you. And then she just prattles on about what’s been happening in the neighborhood. And I thought, bingo. If that’s how you say you would talk to her if she was in the armchair, then I would take your word for it. And so from that I could just parrot that very idiosyncratic style.

And I wasn’t planning to have that many letters. I thought I’d have about three and that they would be agony. Actually, I found them very easy and so I knocked off rather a few. The other liberating thing was I thought, oh, for Heaven’s sake, nobody will ever read this. I’ll show this to my husband or my agent, they’ll say, well, that’s very mortifying, and it would just be sort of put in a drawer. And I didn’t show it to anyone as I was writing it. So I just thought, I’m just going to enjoy myself, do what I set out to do and then show it to somebody or other.

And that was, that was very liberating because I think if comments have been coming in as I’ve been writing, if you’ve sold something in advance, of course, the editor has a stake. But golly, it’s nice not having it and just working it out for yourself. Because you go up a blind alley, but it’s in reversing down the blind alley that you find your way back onto the right route. And if you’ve got somebody saying, you’re up a blind alley, where you’re going to go is there, I think you miss out a crucial part of the process.

So, I evolve her over that period of time, still very unsure that it would ever find a publisher. And then when it would find a publisher, if I would be absolutely beaten up by furious Jane-ites, because nobody had really done it before. They’d done it in the movies, but they hadn’t done it in a novel. And to my surprise, they’ve been unbelievably generous and welcoming about the whole thing.

Jace Lacob: You write of Jane, “From the most tender age, she had a seer’s talent for the analysis of character and the prediction of disasters. She was, indeed, something of the Cassandra of legend. It was their joke that the name should rightly be hers.” How did the two sisters, Jane and Cassandra balance each other?

Gill Hornby: It was sort of perfection really. It was the perfect relationship. It’s one of those relationships, like a marriage, really, would one be the same without the other? And the whole time they were growing up, Cassandra was three years older, she was much better looking, she was much more organized, more capable. Really intelligent. There were six boys and there were two girls, so they were immediately bonded by being the only girls in this sea of brothers. And by the difference in their circumstances, you know, they all grew up in the same Steventon Rectory, her brothers were able to go off and be things like admirals and run a bank and become a landed gentleman. The girls had nothing, marriage or drop dead sort of thing. And so they were each other’s kind of chosen company all the way through.

And also, Cassandra was just a natural carer. She looked after people and Jane was her life’s work really. Really, she was clever enough to recognize that this talent was very special and good enough to devote herself to the protection of it. And then after her death, which left Cassandra utterly grief torn, she had 30 years without her, during which she was the keeper of the flame, as Jane’s kind of fame dwindled and then began to spark up again. And she was the executive of her will.

Jace Lacob: There is a beautiful thread throughout Miss Austen about lives lived and what’s left behind. You write, “Cassandra took another bite and Eliza was conjured up before her. She could taste her in the fruit, see her picking and stirring and laughing and pouring and thought, these are the things by which most of us are remembered, these small acts of love. The only evidence that we too once lived on this earth. The preserves in the larder, the stitch on the kneeler, the mark of the pen on the page.” Is there power in small things when the larger ones prove fragile?

Gill Hornby: Completely. Absolutely. How many of us are going to be remembered for our work? Really, very, very, very few. We will be remembered for the love we showed to other people, for the physical evidence we leave on the earth. And for things like the parties we threw and the kindness we showed, these are the things that matter. I mean, I did think of that line when I was in our Kintbury church and looking at the kneelers that have all been, tapestry on them that has been done over the last 200 years by women in the village commemorating jubilees and armistice and this, that and the other, you know, the death of the vicar, whatever.

And I look at them and then I try and think of the women behind it. I mean, buildings, you look at them, and furnishings and yes, I think these are the traces that we leave, but also in other people’s hearts, the people who survive us, absolutely. That’s probably all we can hope for.

MIDROLL

Jace Lacob: Mary Austen emerges as a villain within Miss Austen attempting to reframe the narrative of the Austens for her own ends. Cassandra has her own reasons for wanting to protect Jane. How does the struggle between these two women power Miss Austen?

Gill Hornby: Well, quite a lot. And also it’s true, Mary Austen, she has a moment at the end of the novel where she’s slightly redeemed, and the way she’s portrayed in the TV series, it’s done absolutely brilliantly. It kind of crumples you. The actress is just sublime. But she was very, very jealous of them both. She felt that she should be treated as another sister because she’d married their eldest brother. But she didn’t have any of their attributes at all. And she became very bitter.

But yeah, there were forces within the family. Because Jane, of course, wrote completely anonymously in her own lifetime. And her authorship was an enormous secret that she didn’t share, even with nieces and nephews who were curled up on the sofa reading Pride and Prejudice, she wouldn’t say, oh, I wrote that. And they’d have fallen off the sofa if they’d been told. It was a very private matter. Mary Austen’s son in his biography writes about her just only writing for the entertainment of the family and for her own satisfaction. Rubbish.

She really wanted commercial success. She knew she was good. She’d read every novel under the sun. She knew she could rate hers as being among the highest. She wanted what she deserved. And money being in such short supply in her life, she very much wanted more of it, but also what she considered her due. After her death, one brother and nephew, who took on the sort of legacy aspect, just tried to create this image of this very timid little Christian creature who just was completely content in her own village and just wrote to amuse the family by the fireside and no turbulence interrupted the smooth course of her life. Which is of course total rubbish, but it was legacy management.

So, that was kind of one prong of the legacy. The other prong would’ve been the truth, which is what Cassandra wanted to conceal, which was the melancholia and the troubles and the, I mean, it’s not just depression I don’t think she was trying to hide from the burning of the letters, but it was a certain lack of, some disobliging attitude to an awful lot of family members, particularly sisters in law, and particularly Mary Austen, that would’ve very much hurt the feelings of people who lived on. So, Cassandra believed that Jane’s view was, she wanted to be remembered for her novels.

This contemporary idea we have of fame, that it’s a goal in itself, that you don’t have to write the great novel or be a towering president or anything to achieve fame. You just want fame, so you go on reality television and you build up fame by your own fame, that sort of rather peculiar thing that’s going on these days. I cannot overestimate how Jane would’ve found that repulsive. Jane was all about success and reviews. She took notes of all of her reviews that were hugely important to her, but fame was repulsive. But also she was very refined. And she was in that way a very sort of deep Christian, thoughtful, sensible person.

And it was a thing in those days, legacy management. Cassandra being diligent, efficient, conscientious and intelligent, burned the lot. And cleverly what she did was contribute, I think, to Jane’s success. And so, we know little enough about her to think that she’s wonderful, but not really come up with any case against her.

Jace Lacob: Cassie makes Tom a promise swearing before God that she will never marry any man other than him. When he’s killed during his expedition, it becomes a promise that she cannot break. How does the thousand pound legacy he left Cassie compound that? Is it living proof of the bargain she made in front of God?

Gill Hornby: Well, we do not know that she made a bargain in front of God. I put in the bargain in front of God. But I think it would’ve weighed on her. A thousand pounds was a hell of a lot of money. And that also was very important to Jane’s future because it meant that they were not utterly penniless because the income from it was at least enough for some food for them. Although it never got to that because their brothers were supportive and nice. But, I think it was a slight burden because he had nieces and a mother and so on. He didn’t have to give it to her, and she hadn’t done a day’s work as a wife, as it were. So there was no need really to recompense her. It was a godsend, an absolute godsend because it gave her a certain sort of independence.

It’s a beautiful thing that legacy, because she died quite a rich woman, weirdly, Cassandra. For a start, she was the beneficiary of Jane’s will. And though the novels were kind of slowing up considerably, they did at least tick over. And also, if you lived to a certain age, she was 74, enough people have died to leave you enough money to build it up a bit. So there was that. And in her will she remembered all the other single women, including Tom Fowle’s niece, who never married and who, in Kintbury, was devoting her life in the way that Cassandra devoted her life to Jane, was devoting her life to the village children. And she left that whole a thousand pounds, which is a very potent sum in value, but also that is what Tom had left her, who then started the first Kintbury village school with it.

So it’s very beautiful. I find that so moving that that’s how the money kind of traveled through time. It supported Jane and Cassandra, then it grew back again, and then it went to Tom’s niece, and then it became the first schoolhouse.

Jace Lacob: They all pay it forward.

Gill Hornby: Isn’t it amazing?

Jace Lacob: It’s a beautiful thing. Cassandra’s story is one of love and devotion to her sister. Jane’s legacy is safe, her place in the literary firmament secure. These are not strange ancient animals or South Dorsett fossils to be looked at with curiosity. Was this the aim behind writing Miss Austen, to treat the two sisters as fallible human beings full of beautiful contradiction and life?

Gill Hornby: Absolutely, to just sort of bring them back really. I think partly because I do have a very firm opinion of what Jane was like, and I wanted to present it, and I enjoyed presenting it, this very, very complicated creature. And as I say, nothing like the way she’s portrayed on the 10 pound note or any of the rest of it. Cassandra I had to create. We’ve got a few letters from her in much older age to a cousin that are privately published that I read. And I didn’t read them until I was very late on into the novel, and I was delighted to find that I think I got her right, which is that she has that dry wit and sharpness as well. But she’s much sort of cooler with it, I think.

But for the rest of it, I just had to create her from being the person that Jane was writing to. Although she’s remembered by her nephew as a dry, joyless, old stick, so annoying, Jane at one point writes, “oh God, I loved your account of the ball last night. I nearly died laughing as we used to say when we were little. You really are the finest comic writer of our age.” And Jane Austen wrote that to Cassandra. So, she was not a person without a sense of humor and that they did really have a laugh when they were in their happy times.

I think it’s very important to recognize what she went through, what they both went through, the battle for these books. They didn’t just float out of people. I mean, all writers know that it’s a battle and that just writing the thing in the first place is a sort of triumph of will. But to do it in the way that Jane did it, to be just getting into her stride as a young woman and then just ripped away from it, and she had these manuscripts of these future masterpieces and she just carried them around with her in a writing box for eight years and didn’t get them out. She just carried them around and at one point they were changing horses at a staging coach inn, and the writing box was put on the wrong coach. Can you imagine?

Jace Lacob: Potentially lost forever?

Gill Hornby: Yes, and it was retrieved fortunately. But that’s how precarious it was. And she didn’t know in that time that it was going to come right, that she would be published, a miraculous idea, and that she would have peace of mind in which to just live and write and not have a kind of bossy husband around wanting his dinner on the table, but to just have the freedom of the day to get on with it.

Jace Lacob: “After all, Jane’s story and her own could not be separated,” you write. “They were bound tight together to form one complete history. On the fortunes of the other, each life had turned.” Writing for Lit Hub, you said, “In the story of our blessed Jane, Cassandra is the wicked one.” Does Miss Austen ultimately exonerate Cassandra Austen? And do you believe that Jane Austen herself would’ve approved of the bonfire?

Gill Hornby: Well, I jolly well hope it exonerates her as that was all the work was for. So yes, it blooming well does that it really, I think, I hope, I prove, I show that without Cassandra there would be no novels and that it is time to stop calling her wicked and just be grateful for everything that she did, that she was on our side. And she was on Jane’s side in the burning of the letters. It was a deeply protective act of love to burn the letters, and I think it’s quite right that she did. Of course, the irony is that I have every sympathy with their position on privacy, and I have every sympathy with Cassandra for burning the letters, and then, I barge in and invent everything I think they’ve left out and invade their privacy completely, a hundred percent. But there we go.

Jace Lacob: But with love. With love.

Gill Hornby: With love, yeah. It’s a different sort of love.

Jace Lacob: Your brother is novelist Nick Hornby, your husband is novelist Robert Harris. You said, “A male interviewer once asked me if I’d really written my novels given who my husband and brother were. I said, why haven’t you asked me if I’d written theirs?” How much do you think Jane Austen would’ve loved to have read that sentiment?

Gill Hornby: Well, yeah. I think we have a similar experience in that. She was so overshadowed by her brothers completely. She had one that was rich, one that flew through Oxford and ran a literary magazine and patronized her, wrote execrable poetry and dreadful long essays, which were the fashion at the time, and was so patronizing to her about writing novels because they were a newfangled nonsense. So she knew, like me, what it’s like to live under the shadow of the patriarchy. And so yes, I think she would’ve enjoyed it.

Jace Lacob: There is a beautiful note of optimism embedded within Miss Austen, “Happy endings are there for us somewhere woven into the mix of life’s fabric,” you write, “we just have to search the detail, follow the pattern to find the one that should be our own.” The impetus for your first novel, The Hive came, I believe, from being fired by the Daily Telegraph while reporting a natural disaster in Tenerife. Did you apply that metric, searching for the pattern to find the one that should be your own in your own life and your own career as a novelist?

Gill Hornby: I think it’s something I’ve only understood in the last few years that actually I’m nothing without rejection. I kind of poodle along very happily whistling in the sunshine, and then if I get some kick up the bum like getting the sack or being rejected from a university, then I get my act together and double my efforts and knock it out of the park. But other than that, I can sort of sink into complacence with remarkable ease.

So, I started writing novels in my fifties. It never occurred to me to write a novel before that. For a start, everybody else in my family was at it, but also, I just hadn’t written any fiction since I was 16. I was writing book reviews and columns and things like that, but I wasn’t writing fiction. And I think it’s really important not to stand there when you are 21 and say, I’m going to be ‘a this’. And you don’t have to these days because life, professional life, is so much more complex and we all work so much longer. It’s not like anybody retires at 50 anymore.

And so, I think it is very important with life to just sniff your way through to find opportunities and to jump at chances. And that’s something Jane and Cassandra had to do, they had to improvise. When they weren’t married by the age of 25, they had to improvise how they were going to get through. And I think I’ve done a lot of improvisation actually, and it’s worked out all right. And as long as the Lord spares us and you have your health, life is long, and do not judge yourself on where you are when you’re 30. When I was 30, I was just knee deep in nappies and just kept having babies. And then lo and behold, they grew up and suddenly I have all of this energy and confidence that I never had as a younger person.

Jace Lacob: I love that. Gill Hornby, thank you so very much.

Gill Hornby: Thank you for having me.

Next time, we return to the bucolic world of Grantchester where spring is in the air, new romances bloom, and murder is afoot. 

CLIP

Reg: The end is nigh! The end is nigh! It’s a hijacking, that’s what this is. Easter has been hijacked by the devil incarnate.

Alphy: Morning, Reg. How are we?

Reg: How are we? Doomed to Hellfire for all eternity. That’s how we are.

Alphy: No donkey ride for you then?

Be sure to tune in to the tenth season premiere of Grantchester, Sunday, June 15th at 9pm Eastern, on MASTERPIECE on PBS.