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At the heart of the BBC’s new series Miss Austen is a fictional Cassandra Austen (played by Keeley Hawes). Reviews have stressed that the real life Cassandra’s destruction of her sister Jane Austen’s letters has been considered one of the greatest acts of literary vandalism in history. These letters would have provided an invaluable insight into the author who died so young.
Why Cassandra destroyed her sister’s correspondence – and what she destroyed – cannot be known. But Miss Austen gives us intriguing speculation. It deals with family relationships, and with what gets passed down to subsequent generations.
In Miss Austen, Mary Austen is considering encouraging her son James Edward to write a biography of his literary father and aunt. Cassandra must find her sister’s letters before they get into the wrong hands. What happens next is a clever blend of fact and fiction.
James Edward Austen-Leigh did publish the first full biography of his aunt with the help of his sisters, although not until 1869.
However, the series also deviates from fact in its depiction of an incident in Jane’s life in the early 1800s. She may have met a young gentleman at a seaside resort in Devon. This young man may have admired Jane and she may have admired him in turn.
This story was recounted to James Edward Austen-Leigh by his sister when he was preparing a second edition of his Jane Austen memoir. She had been told the story by Cassandra and, though she could not remember the young man’s name, she knew he died shortly after Jane’s encounter with him.
Miss Austen picks up on the suggestion of Jane’s shadowy seaside encounter, locates the events firmly in Sidmouth, names the gentleman Mr Hobday and gives the encounter an intriguing twist by making it Cassandra’s, not Jane’s, romance.
Jane Austen might have enjoyed this fictionalisation.
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A love of fiction and an aversion to history
In the concluding paragraphs of Mansfield Park (1814), Austen’s narrator purposely abstains from dates, “that every one may be at liberty to fix their own”. In Northanger Abbey, the heroine Catherine Morland has no taste for “real, solemn History.” Instead, the novels of Maria Edgeworth and Frances Burney are championed as “works in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed”.
Miss Austen’s Jane is played by Patsy Ferran as witty, acerbic and, crucially, devoted to fiction. She is utterly determined to become a published author and her family support her in this pursuit. This Austen is true to the version of the author that scholars and biographers have presented in recent years.
Jane Austen’s novels are not about the union of one couple. They explore communities and dependence, particularly that of women. Foremost in these explorations are sisterly bonds.
In Austen’s fiction, these bonds may indeed be mutually supportive and fulfilling. But they are always complex too. It is the truth of these complexities that the series Miss Austen captures so beautifully, via Isabella Fowle and her relationship with her sisters, and of course via Cassandra’s relationship with hers.
This adaptation should send viewers to read Gill Hornby’s novel, and to read and reread Jane Austen. Miss Austen embraces the possibilities of fiction in rethinking the lives of the past.
I hope viewers of Miss Austen will think more favourably about the real Cassandra too.
She kept letters and Jane’s manuscripts, leaving them to her nieces on her death. Jane and Cassandra had six brothers.
She was not the only one who had letters that gave insight into Jane Austen’s mind. She must have also written countless more to her other brothers and their wives, her nieces and nephews and her friends.
Many of these are now lost to us. But Cassandra’s curation of her sister’s correspondence can be seen in a positive light when we reflect on what she preserved in relation to what was lost.
Gillian Dow does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
