Miss Austen

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2025

Drama
Romance

Summary

Historical drama based on Gill Hornby's novel, starring Keeley Hawes as Jane Austen's sister, who attempts to conceal the author's secrets years after her death. Also starring Alfred Enoch

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Review

David Brown

All we need to know about Jane Austen can be found within the pages of her novels. Not my words, but those spoken here by her older sister Cassandra (played by Keeley Hawes), who would go on to earn the ire of Janeites when she destroyed a trove of her sibling’s letters in what was believed to be a bid to protect her reputation. But what was the catalyst for the torching of the correspondence?

This intriguing four-parter, adapted from Gill Hornby’s novel and rich in period detail, imagines the story surrounding the burning by taking us first to 1830 and the Berkshire village of Kintbury, which Cassandra is visiting 13 years after Jane’s death. It’s here that we find not only the Fowles family, who are close friends of the Austens, but also those key missives that would so fire up Cassandra.

And as events flash back to 1795, courtships not dissimilar to those in Pride and Prejudice are revealed to have sparked tensions, the truth of which has been concealed for decades…

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7.4/10