This interview was transcribed from Harper’s Bazaar UK Magazine – February 2025 issue

A TALE OF TWO SISTERS

Erica Wagner goes behind the scenes of a new BBC drama exploring the relationship between Jane Austen and her beloved – but often misunderstood – sibling Cassandra.

Jane Austen’s novels are immortal. Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma – these, and her other books, are testament to a brilliantly perceptive mind and heart. But where Austen’s intent was strong, her body was not. She was barely 42 when she died in 1817, so her work was promoted after her death by her elder sister Cassandra. However, Cassandra also perpetrated a notorious act of literary vandalism when she burned most of her sister’s letters before her own death in 1845.

That accusation caught the attention of the novelist Gill Hornby, who, in 2020, published Miss Austen, an acclaimed novel that ventriloquises Jane and her sister to a remarkable extent. In doing so, i it offers context to Cassandra’s shocking act. ‘I very much wanted to write about this slighted sister who was constantly being duffed up by biographers – everyone hates her, because she burnt the letters,’ Hornby tells me. She set out to investigate the family dynamic in more depth and, on reading Jane’s surviving epistles to her sister, discovered to her surprise that they were ‘love letters’. ‘She adored her, she worshipped her,’ says Hornby.

History has painted the two women with broad brushstrokes. Jane was seen as sparkling and wonderful; Cassandra as a boring old stick.’ Neither sister married. Cassandra’s fiancé died; she devoted herself thereafter to Jane and the family. ‘I’ve always been intrigued by the stories of women in those days whose lives did not pan out,’ explains Hornby, who had previously published two novels and a short biography of Austen. ‘You were supposed to get married and have children. If you didn’t, what did you do? How did you get by? How did you live on your wits?’

Out of these questions came a fascinating novel that will now reach new audiences in the form of a four-part BBC drama, translated for the screen by the Bafta- winning writer Andrea Gibb, who has adapted Mayflies and Elizabeth is Missing. The drama moves back and forth between the ‘present’, when an older Cassandra, played by Keeley Hawes, tries to retrieve Jane’s letters, fearing the revelations in them could damage her late sister’s reputation, and the past, showing Jane and Cassandra as young women. Patsy Ferran shines as Jane, and Synnøve Karlsen sensitively portrays a younger Cassandra. Hornby is thrilled with the result. ‘Everyone has brought their A-game,’ she says. ‘Over the four episodes, it just gets better and better. And the BBC hasn’t done a proper bonnet-fest for ages. Karlsen suits her bonnet perfectly, and already had a strong relationship with Hawes, who played her mother in The Midwich Cuckoos, a 2022 adaptation of John Wyndham’s classic novel. ‘We’re really close,’ Karlsen says. I see her as a mentor. We both just knew that we would be able to slide into these roles and bring [the story] to life together – but in quite different ways.’ Depicting the Austens’ ‘sisterly bond’ was vital to her portrayal of the young Cassandra. ‘I think it’s hard to understand now how precarious a woman’s position was then, relying so much on who you married, whether you married, what your brothers ended up doing, what happened to your father,’ she says. ‘Cassy becomes Jane’s biggest cheerleader and supporter. When Jane dies, Cassy’s role is protecting her legacy.’

Cassandra has been depicted as a villain of history: Miss Austen, in its intelligent speculation, adds complexity to our idea of her – and the part she played in the life of her extraordinary sister Jane.

Miss Austen will air on BBC iPlayer and BBC One in February.

Source: Harper’s Bazaar UK Magazine – February 2025 | Transcribed by: Keeley Hawes News