Book Description
This is the story of a relationship between two sisters. One, Jane Austen, became a famous author; the other, her beloved elder sister Cassandra, was her confidante and supporter. It is suspected and often lamented that some of the letters which Jane Austen wrote to her family and friends were deliberately destroyed by Cassandra after Jane’s death. Thus posterity has not had the chance to learn much about their relationship or Jane’s sometimes controversial comments on the people she met and on the established social norms of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
After their father’s death, they lived together with their mother, suffering at first hand the lack of income and dependency on their relatives which was the fate of the single woman with little status in the social hierarchies of the time, and which Jane Austen used to such brilliant effect in her novels.
From the Author
This story
Cassandra and Jane is a fictional account of what might have been. I intend the book to be a homage to Jane and to the sister whom she loved more than any other person. Some of the conversations I have suggested could have taken place, may indeed have happened; others may not have done. I hope those who read this ‘fictional memoire’ will accept that the book is offered with respect and admiration to the memory to these two remarkable women.
About the Author
Jill Pitkeathley was born in Guernsey in the Channel Islands, and gained a degree at Bristol University. She began her career in Manchester in social work, and then combined part-time employment with bringing up her two children, and producing publications for the Kings Fund and the Volunteer Centre.
In 1986 she became Chief Executive of the Carers National Association (now Carers UK). There, she transformed the public perception of the six million people who care for others in our society.
Jill Pitkeathley became a Life Peer in 1997. She has twice recovered from cancer, most recently in 2001 when she spent 6 months in hospital. A long-standing enthusiast for the works of Jane Austen, she resolved at that time, if and when she recovered from her illness, to write a book about the novelist. Cassandra & Jane is the result.
