This year is the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. Janeites rejoice (in suitably restrained and quietly sardonic fashion)! Brontë devotees – I suppose you had better go for a long walk across a large moor until it is one of your lot’s time to shine again.
Until then, it is all things Austen. Expect genteel celebrations from Bath to Hampshire and screen and print schedules stuffed with tributes to, dramas inspired by and features about the great woman and her works for the next 12 glorious months. First off the televisual blocks is Miss Austen, an adaptation of Gill Hornby’s book of the same name, which tells the story of the just-beginning-to-be-famed Regency novelist through the eyes of the beloved sister who long survived her, Cassandra – played by Keeley Hawes with her customary controlled, unshowy magnificence.
Cassandra, of course, was responsible for what some consider to be the greatest act of literary vandalism in history – and certainly one that causes every Janeite to double up in pain when they think of it. She destroyed almost all her vast collection of her sister’s correspondence to protect her and the family’s reputation and privacy. Of an estimated 3,000 letters, about 160 survive – mostly given to other family members as mementoes and therefore probably among the most anodyne examples from what would have been the treasure trove of treasure troves for future fans and scholars.
In Miss Austen, we have Cassandra travelling to the home of family friends the Fowles, as the man of the house lies dying, to retrieve any letters between his late wife, Eliza, and Jane before they are found by anyone else, particularly the Austens’ vicious sister-in-law Mary (Jessica Hynes). Mary wants a biography to be written – albeit of her husband, James, with Jane as something of an addendum.
The sisters’ lives unfold in a series of extended flashbacks as Cassandra (whose younger version is played by Synnøve Karlsen) reads through the letters she finds in Eliza’s bedroom. The women’s closeness is deftly evoked by a script that manages the astonishing feat of sounding effortlessly Janeish (witty not waspish, appraising not cold), with Patsy Ferran giving a perfect performance as the young author. I suspect that the inescapable charisma and energy (stopping just short of pertness), impeccable timing, light touch and shining intelligence she brings to the part will be greeted with cheers and no little relief.
Back in the present, as it were (about 1830), Cassandra becomes embroiled in the fate of Eliza’s daughter Isabella (Rose Leslie), whose position as an unmarried woman is used to evoke many of the concerns that infused Austen’s work. Her father – a terrible bully, we are told – was the local vicar and on his death she is unceremoniously commanded to leave within a fortnight by the new incumbent (a mansplainer with an unctuous touch of Mr Collins thrown in, delightfully and delightedly played by Thomas Coombes). Isabella faces life as an impecunious and unwanted guest of one of her sisters, unless Cassandra can find an alternative – or the obstacles to a relationship between Isabella and the doctor who cared for her father (Alfred Enoch) can be removed.
Everything about Miss Austen is masterly, from the individual performances to the interweaving of narrative strands past and present. And it manages to keep Jane as the presiding spirit without selling any of the other characters short. Mary is a masterpiece of natural malevolence further curdled by time and experience; Isabella is a finely drawn portrait of frustration; and Cassandra is a fully realised woman, shaped by grief and by love and sacrifice for her sister, and sharing the family fondness for oblique put-down.
Bonnets, brittleness and any form of simpering are conspicuous by their absence, and the four-part series becomes ever more of a treat as it goes on – warm, intelligent, clear-eyed, confident and thought-provoking. How much is established fact and how much is the work of imagination, I am not equipped to know, but the beauty is that it all feels true; to the age, to the books and to what we know – or feel we know – about their author. We may never truly forgive Cassandra for her bonfire, but Miss Austen goes a long way to easing the pain.
