Genre: Historical Fiction
Reading Level/Interest Level: Young Adult (Grade 7 & up)
Awards: None
Similar Titles: My Name is Phillis Wheatley : A Story of Slavery and Freedom by Afua Cooper, I Was Jane Austen’s Best Friend by Cora Harrison.
Cassandra’s Sister, is the tale of the life
of Jane Austen, called Jenny as a young girl, growing up with a sea of brothers
and one devoted sister, Cassandra, from a girl raised in a rectory, consumed by
her duty to marry well to improve the situation of her family, but not quite
fitting into the standard mold of an English gentlewoman in nature, to the time
she has become celebrated authoress and “spinster.”
Very
similar in speech and story to the motion picture, “Becoming Jane”, starring
Anne Hathaway, the story begins with the death of Jane’s cousin Eliza’s
husband, a French count, by the blade of the guillotine. Eliza’s forward
manners, afforded by her new single status and more particularly, by her
wealth, changes Jane’s view of the world and her relationship with it and her
siblings. Combined with her sister’s tragedies, social prejudices, deaths in the family, shocking
scandals and her own dramatic , but tragic, brushes with love, Jane soon begins to emulate the characters she
has so painstakingly created in Sense and
Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice,
from real life, blurring the lines between who created whom. Did the author
create the characters or did the manuscript shape the author?
Still
in love with a man she cannot have, and very much a different person than the
girl she used to be, Jane will be faced with a pivotal decision. Should she,
can she, marry a man, who would make a respectable husband and strengthen her
family’s position or will her sister’s words, her pen and her own conscience
force her to turn away?
This
is a great introduction to Jane Austen for the older of the tween set. Written with
period appropriate syntax but still in an easy and pleasurable format, readers will
be able to ascertain from this novel, if they might be interested in reading
Austen’s original works, particularly because the topics covered in her novels
stem from her knowledge of them in real life and the emotion and family turmoil
they could cause, in an elegant age, when duty was considered more important
that being true to oneself and pursuing a life for happiness’s sake.
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