Marianne, Louisa and Cassandra Knight – May, Lou and Cass – were Jane Austen’s nieces. Jane knew the girls well, reading and sewing with them as they grew up, and they were often the subjects of her witty letters.The Knight sisters went on to lead lives that bore a remarkable resemblance to the plots of their aunt’s famous novels. Handsome noblemen, dashing officers and penurious clergymen sought their hands in marriage, and just like Austen’s heroines, May, Lou and Cass experienced the pains of blighted love, the joy of patience rewarded and the sorrow of losing their childhood home.Yet even Jane Austen could not have imagined that her genteel nieces would find themselves in Ireland, a country riven with famine and land wars. Drawing on diaries, manuscripts and letters, May, Lou & Cass tells for the first time the story of the Knight sisters and their extraordinary journey from the ordered world of Regency England to the turbulent upheaval of nineteenth-century Ireland.