Inspired by a real-life literary mystery, this novel reimagines the relationship between Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra. Taking the burning of the author’s letters as a starting point, the story explores why Cassandra destroyed them.

Throughout her lifetime, Jane Austen wrote countless letters to her sister. 1840: twenty-three years after the death of Jane, Cassandra Austen returns to the village of Kintbury, and the home of her family's friends, the Fowles. She knows that, in a corner of the 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 sister, she pieces together buried truths about Jane's history and her own. She faces a 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, Miss Austen is a novel about the loves and lives of Cassandra and Jane Austen.