The hill rose ahead of her; its brow fringed with a red-golden light. She stopped to take a deep breath and saw, at the edge of the field, the thrust of a first daffodil – radiant in a great clump of green. She smiled. So nature was turning once more: taking that which is dead and creating new life from its goodness. Binding the past in with the future.

And, with a strange sense of ease as she had not known for some months, Miss Cassandra Austen resumed her long, slow ascent through the park, to the eternal comfort of home.

Author’s Note

Fanny Knight kept a daily journal from 1804, when she was eleven years old, until she was eighty. And, though I have taken one liberty – Cassandra was not at Mary’s deathbed, but anxiously waiting for news back in Chawton – the narrative of this novel exactly follows her record of events. However, though the diaries are detailed – who, what, where and how was the weather? – they are hardly confessional. Feelings and attitudes are only mentioned at times of some crisis and the rest I have imagined.

The pocketbooks in which Fanny wrote are very small and she tended to use a thick nib, so they are not always easy to decipher. Still, it is possible to read between the lines of what she chooses to say. For example, whenever she mentions her spouse, he is always ‘My darling husband’ or ‘Sir Edward’ – even though she’s so short on space. And all of her family – father and siblings – get a ‘darling’ or ‘dearest’ before their names. Her stepchildren, however, do not. Indeed, Mary does not become ‘dear Mary’ until after she has betrayed her own parents. But by then, of course, she has become a Knight.

Although Fanny was only writing for her own interest and perhaps for her children to read after her death, the pocketbooks now have a whole other value which she can scarcely have imagined, for they are our principal source of Austen chronology. It is from their pages that scholars have managed to piece together many blanks in her Aunt Jane’s life and chart the full history of the extraordinary Austen family.

We see fortunes rise and then fall; hopes being crushed; love starting to blossom. But most striking of all, to the modern reader, is to witness the perilous nature of the lives of the married women. The birth of every child is a moment of danger. The loved ones of expectant mothers are on high alert. As well as her own mother, who died after her eleventh baby, Fanny lost two Austen aunts in the same way and later, one sister and a few sisters-in-law. If you married young and were happily fertile, then it was a game of Russian roulette, year after year.