In the first half of the nineteenth century, the posthumous publication of private letters became a major business. There was the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, the Bluestocking letters of Elizabeth Carter, Catherine Talbot, and Elizabeth Montagu, the many gossipy volumes of Horace Walpole, and the letters and diaries of Frances Burney, to name just a few. The words of the dead were repackaged by, and for, the living – each time with disclaimers that, while of course the original correspondents would not have wanted to see their letters in print, there were compelling reasons (historical, literary, moral, financial) for doing so in this instance. One manuscript writer, worrying about the ‘Heaps of Letters’ left to her by her own family, would term it a ‘Letter-loving Age’ where ‘everything private becomes public.’[1]
Cassandra Austen, the novelist’s surviving sister, must have been keenly aware of this when she made the decision to burn the vast majority of the letters written by Jane. The story – or at least a story – behind her act of destruction has now been dramatised in Miss Austen (BBC One and iPlayer), a four-episode series adapted by Andrea Gibb from the 2021 novel by Gill Hornby.
Arriving as part of the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth, the miniseries is a triumph of production design, managing to combine Instagram aspiration (who wouldn’t want Cassandra’s Chawton Cottagecore aesthetic?) with period authenticity. Everything on screen looks beautiful, from Regency houses to the perfectly folded and postmarked letters themselves. The costumes and styling signal the changing timelines between the main setting in the 1830s and flashbacks to the turn of the century, while also suggesting the characters’ financial standing – not all of them are dressed in the latest fashions, with some Regency silhouettes lingering into the ‘present day’. And while some purists might quibble with Rose Leslie’s loose tendrils, at least all the women’s hair is consistently worn up.
The casting of the main roles is also impeccable. Synnøve Karlsen as the young Cassie is poised and glowing (though she really does not suit yellow), while Patsy Ferran makes for an exceptionally wry, sparky Jane – exactly the sort of face we could imagine peeking out of her sister’s surviving sketch. Though Ferran is seven years Karlsen’s senior, their relationship dynamic as siblings is crystal clear: Cassie as the responsible protector, and Jane a little firework of a woman leaving people singed in her wake. Keeley Hawes is also perfect as the older version of Cassandra, daylight playing over the lines of her face as it shifts between well-worn grief, dry humour, and steely intelligence. Jessica Hynes, as their sister-in-law Mary Austen (with Liv Hill as her younger incarnation) finds some flashes of humanity within a character largely written as caricature.
Like Sense & Sensibility, this is primarily a love story between sisters, and it is packed with familiar Austen tropes – candlelit balls, matchmaking mamas, seaside resorts, the outwardly-calm older daughter trying to master her feelings, an unctuous vicar, and unpleasant in-laws. There is some pleasure in spotting these references, though at times (as in the portrayal of Mary Austen, or the flawlessly perfect suitor who romances Cassie) the shorthand sketches sit awkwardly alongside the complexity of actual lives. A climactic scene, in which a reading of Persuasion precipitates a real romantic resolution, just feels tacked-on and silly. The actual shape of Jane Austen’s story is not one of dramatic reversals but slow tragedy. With a youth full of promise, she and Cassie gradually find their lives constricted by circumstance, finding release in their love for each other and a shared passion for Jane’s writing, until the firework finally burns itself out. To Gibb and Hornby’s credit, they do not posit any shocking secrets (secret marriage, political radicalism, lesbian love affairs?) within the letters Cassandra chooses to withhold from the world – only the everyday struggles of depression and writer’s block, the shade to the light of Austen’s genius. Cassandra smiles with affection as she burns them, protecting her younger sister to the last.
With all these virtues and care in the execution, then, it is a shame the screenplay falls so far short of Austen, or even Andrew Davies at his best. Characters are constantly repeating each other’s names or being reminded of their own family relationships. At times, they lapse into the kind of semantically-empty ‘period’ dialect that might termed Bridgerton-ese – it is a most delightful evening indeed, is it not? – as if to suggest that Regency people, like Data the Android, were incapable of using contractions.
Every beat of emotion and plot is bluntly and repeatedly spelled out, just in case (presumably) the viewer happened to be scrolling on their phone. In the opening episode – having announced that Cassandra is going to the Fowles’ to recover Jane’s letters, attempting several times to get into the room containing Jane’s letters, having a conversations about how Jane’s letters must be in that room, and perpetrating a miniature heist to search said room for Jane’s letters – Hawes is forced to mutter out loud to herself, ‘where are Jane’s letters?’ as she rummages through the drawers. How else would we remember what she was looking for?
To reduce Austen’s writing to a set of aesthetics and tropes, punctuated by the clanging thud of exposition, is surely its own kind of disservice. In her novels, she always displayed a keen sense of what readers did or didn’t know – when to reveal a characters’ secret thoughts, and when to step aside and let us fill in the blanks. This kind of fine, subtle work – delineating an entire universe within a bit of ivory, two inches wide – is difficult, and it might well make a writer feel depressed in the process. But surely it’s worth the effort, as the success of such disparate shows as Wolf Hall and Severance demonstrates. If only more contemporary television was willing to make one – to both demand and reward the viewer’s full attention, as Austen does – that really would be most delightful indeed.
[1] Amabel Grey, Lady Lucas, to Philip Yorke, 3rd Earl of Hardwicke, 4 February 1808, BL Add MS 35647 f. 134.