Last night, I watched on Amazon Prime the first two episodes of a British minioseries, Miss Austen, based on the novel by Gill Hornby. After Jane Austen's death, many of her letters were burned by her sister Cassandra, which makes writing a biography of Miss Austen difficult. In 1840 Cassandra returns to the village of Kintbury, where she grew up, to help the daughter of her friend Eliza Fowle clear out her house after her father's death. There, she discovers a collection of letters from Jane to Eliza, whose brother Tom was once engaged to Cassandra, and the letters reveal much about the personal lives of the Austen sisters when they were young, around 1800.
I like the cast a lot. Like the musical Follies, many of the characters ad by two actors as the script jumps forty years from 1840 to the past. An actress named Patsy Ferran plays Jane Austen, and she looks very much like the existing portrait of Jane by Cassandra. She's very quirky and strangely pretty. Her mother and father are played by Phyllis Logan, who was Mrs Hughes in Downton Abbey, and her husband.
This is Cassandra's sketch around 1810, when Jane was 34.
