A flat Austen never matches up to her fictional heroines

There is much to admire in Miss Austen’, the BBC series about Jane and the sister who mysteriously burnt her letters, but it fails to capture the author’s humour

- Nick Hilton

Whether it’s John Murray burning Lord Byron’s letters at Albemarle Street, Charles Dickens consigning his correspondence with Wilkie Collins to the flames, or Sylvia Plath’s personal journals disappearing under the stewardship of her husband Ted Hughes, acts of literary destruction have always intrigued us. They invite us to – almost literally – fill in the blanks. It is the starting point, too, for Gill Hornby’s 2020 novel Miss Austen, adapted now as a four-part BBC One period drama, and asking the simple question: why did Cassandra Austen destroy so many of her sister Jane’s letters?

Jane Austen (Patsy Ferran) is dead. Decades later, her spinster sister Cassandra (Keeley Hawes) discovers that Jane’s letters – in all their acerbic, revelatory glory – are about to fall into the hands of Cassandra’s sister-in-law, and rival, Mary (Jessica Hynes). By now, of course, Jane is well known for her novels, but the letters show “the real Jane Austen” – and Cassandra believes they must be burned. Through this imagined recreation of Austen’s secret letters, that were lost to history, we see the story of how the two young sisters – impish, cynical Jane and beautiful, earnest Cassandra (played, in her youth, by Synnove Karlsen) – managed love, friendship and their most important relationship of all, family. “You and I will always be sisters,” Cassandra warns Jane. “You are saddled with me forever."