Former journalist Gill Hornby, 65, published her first novel in her early 50s but it wasn’t until writing her third, Miss Austen (2020), that she hit her stride. Centred on Jane Austen’s beloved older sister, Cassandra, it probes the mystery of why she destroyed hundreds of their letters, and became a bestseller praised by Janeites. Now, it’s been made into a four-part BBC drama to coincide with the 250th anniversary of Jane’s birth, with Bafta-nominated Keeley Hawes playing Cassandra. Hornby has since written two further novels set in the extended Austen family, the latest of which, The Elopement, will be released in May. She lives in Kintbury, Berkshire, with her husband, the author Robert Harris.

What’s it like seeing Miss Austen on screen?
Obviously the grammar of TV is so different, and Cassandra in the novel is much older. I don’t object to that at all and Keeley Hawes is absolutely marvellous, her performance is so clever and quiet, but the revelation is Patsy Ferran as Jane Austen. She has every quality that I don’t think has ever been shown before in a performance of Austen – that quirky awkwardness, the intelligence that shines out of her.

You weren’t tempted by a role as an extra?
They did ask but I’m not a bonnet type of a girl, so no.

The Austen series began for you with Cassandra. How did you first encounter her?
By moving to Kintbury. We were told by neighbours there was an Austen connection and it turned out that really the connection was Cassandra, who was engaged to the second son of the rectory that stood on the site of our house. Tom Fowle, her fiance, left to go overseas before dawn on a January morning, and she bid him farewell out at the gate there and never saw him again [he died of yellow fever]. I’m haunted by women in history who had their destinies and then had to live on their wits when things went wrong.

She tends to get short shrift from Austen biographers for having burned so much of her sister’s correspondence.
I always feel that we who like Jane’s novels should be on our knees in gratitude for all of the good Cassandra did. Jane was a fragile person and fragile people need their wingman, and that is who she was. If she had married, Jane would have been in the soup. What Cassandra did in burning the letters was protect her sister enormously and do so much to create the brand that we’ve got today because we know so little about Jane, she can be all things to all people.

What do you imagine we get wrong about Jane Austen as a person?
This spinster lark: “She wrote these perfect love stories and she never knew love herself, doesn’t it make your heart break?” No, not at all. She was not suited to the married life and found her paradise at Chawton Cottage with her sister, her mother and her best friend. There was no man to demand dinner, they had autonomy over their finances and where they went. She only had it for eight and a half years and in that time she revised or created the six best novels in the English language.

And as a writer?
We pigeonhole her as a romantic novelist and read her books as love stories but she’s a social commentator and really they’re rescues. At the beginning of all her novels, apart from Emma, the women are in peril. Your Georgian woman would have read the opening page of Pride and Prejudice and thought: “They have an entailed estate and five daughters? Oh my God, this is a horror story.”

Your brother is Nick Hornby. What did your parents do for both their children to grow up into authors?
They got divorced, and one of the byproducts of having divorced parents back in the 60s and 70s – when it was really not common and made you feel different – was that it turns you into an observer. Two other things: my mum dropped us off at Maidenhead library every Saturday morning, which was a passport to another world, and we both had extraordinary English teachers. Nick was always a bit of a swot, but I was pretty terrible until sixth form when Mrs Effendowicz decided to take me by the scruff of the neck and turn me into something. She introduced me to Jane Austen. I still see her and she is one of my first readers.

Would you ever consider writing a joint novel with your husband?
Absolutely not. Getting started in the morning I find quite sticky but he’s Mr 8 O’Clock and has everything plotted out. By the time I got going he’d already be on his second glass of claret! Also, I don’t quite see the point where our genres meet. We’ll stick to his motorway and my meandering path.

Do you have a favourite Austen novel?
I change my mind all the time. I admire Emma enormously as a piece of plotting and I’m discovering Pride and Prejudice anew. It’s a novel about social revolution really, and that moment Lizzy Bennet refuses Darcy is absolutely explosive.

What have you been reading lately?
I’m halfway through Ursula Parrott’s reissued Ex-Wife, which is so modern it’s almost terrifying. Who knew they were up to all this is the 1920s? I loved the last Elizabeth Strout, Tell Me Everything. She and Ann Patchett are my favourite living novelists. Also, The Wedding People by Alison Espach. Read it. It’s so clever and funny, almost a perfect novel.

Is there a book you’ve left unfinished?
Loads. I had knee replacement surgery two months ago and thought all I would do was read but, in fact, I became so impatient everything I took to hospital was hurled at the wall. Life’s too short to spend wondering why somebody wrote this or why somebody else recommended it, but I’m not dictatorial about reading. Growing up, I knew kids who had the sort of parents who thought they shouldn’t read Enid Blyton. Enid Blyton was my soulmate, and I remember thinking: “Thank God my mum doesn’t have those fancy ideas.”