Meet Miss Austen

The 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth will be celebrated in December 2025. Start the celebrations with a mini-series about Miss Austen, about Jane's story but focusing on a different Miss Austen.

It is centred on Cassandra Austen, author Jane’s only sister and close confidant. And the series speculates on why Cassandra burned most of Jane’s correspondence after her untimely death in 1817.

Literary scholars have been frustrated for many years about the very limited amount of historical documents that exist in Jane’s own words, beyond her six novels, which still today remain in print and are very popular, 250 years after her birth. Only 160 letters remain from the thousands she is believed to have written.

Cassandra destroyed Jane’s letters towards the end of her own life, around 1843. The story intrigued novelist Gill Hornby and she set out to imagine what might have motivated Cassandra’s act.

She pulled together the historical facts we have about the sisters, then used her imagination to fill the many gaps, producing the novel Miss Austen in 2020.

The TV adaptation opens in 1830, 17 years after Jane’s death at age 41. Cassandra, played by Keeley Hawes, has returned to Kintbury to help Isabella Fowle nurse her dying father, who is the widower of the sisters’ best friend Eliza. Hornby’s narrative assumes that Cassandra also has an ulterior motive: to retrieve and destroy letters from Jane to Eliza dating from their youth.

In flashback, we discover details about Jane’s writing and Cassandra‘s encouragement. The young women were in a similar situation to the protagonists in Jane’s novels, and many upper-class women in Regency England. After their father’s death they would inherit nothing and be dependent on the charity of remaining male relatives. It was not considered proper for them to actually work. And their only chance of relatively comfortable future would be to marry someone with a good income.

Isabella is facing a similar situation, being unmarried, and having served as her vicar father’s housekeeper, from the moment of his death, she will be evicted from the vicarage by the new vicar and be forced to go and live with family members.

As Cassandra reads the stash of letters she finds, we see in flashback how Cassandra becomes engaged to Eliza’s brother-in-law, Tom Fowle, who goes off on a naval expedition in order to make enough money for their future together and dies while away.

Back in 1830 we also meet Mary Austen, one of Cassandra’s sisters-in-law, who is also searching for the letters. She believes her husband James could have great success with a biography of his sister based on the letters.

Cassandra is determined that Jane’s intimate thoughts and feelings (not to mention acerbic opinions about family members such as Mary) will not be revealed to the world.

As the 250th anniversary of Jane’s birth approaches, Miss Austen is a fascinating look at what the author’s life may have been like. It’s a great starter before a plethora of new adaptations of Austen novels hits our screens. In the works right now are film adaptations of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey, plus a Netflix mini-series adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

Miss Austen is available on Arte.tv till 10 March 2026.

Coming soon: teaching resources around Jane Austen 250.