The Regency period drama genre continues to have a chokehold on viewers in the year 2025. Between anxiously waiting for more news from Bridgerton Season 4 to the availability of period pieces being available on streaming, fans have an endless stream of the genre at their fingertips through their preferred streaming providers. Now, based on the novel by Gill Hornby, we’re getting a fresh entry into the genre: Miss Austen. The Masterpiece on PBS miniseries stars Keeley Hawes as Cassandra Austen, older sister to the famous author, Jane Austen who gave us famous works: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, and more. The trailer seems to follow dual timelines, one of Cassandra in the present, played by Hawes, sometime after Jane Austen’s death in 1817 and also when Jane was still alive, and the sisters were young women. Patsy Ferran plays Jane and Synnøve Karlsen plays a young Cassandra. The logline is as follows:
“Miss Austen takes a literary mystery – Cassandra Austen notoriously burning her famous sister Jane’s letters – and reimagines it as a fascinating, witty and heart-breaking story of sisterly love, while creating in Cassandra a character as captivating as any Austen heroine.”
The Sisterhood of ‘Miss Austen’
Jane and Cassandra were the only daughters of George and Cassandra Austen. In total, the Austens had eight children, with Cassandra and Jane being the fourth and sixth respectively. Neither woman married. Cassandra, a watercolorist, famously burned Jane’s letters posthumously. In the trailer, a character in voiceover is presumably telling Cassandra that Jane “understood the affairs of the heart better than anyone.” We do see romance in the trailer, likely between Rose Leslie and Alfred Enoch‘s characters. Max Irons (The Wife), Calam Lynch (Bridgerton), and Phyllis Logan (Downton Abbey) also star in the four-part series.
It’s estimated that Jane wrote 3,000 letters to her sister, and only less than 200 survive. The bulk were burned or destroyed, and the surviving letters were censored by Cassandra to disguise anything of impropriety or would paint the Austen family in a negative light. While the series seems to romanticize the relationship between Jane and Cassandra, it will be interesting to see how Cassandra concludes to do something like that to Jane’s words, the remaining pieces of her sister, after she’s passed. To see Hawes’s Cassandra make that decision may paint her as less of an Austen heroine and more as a morally gray character.
Miss Austen premieres May 4 on PBS, in the same year celebrating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth (December 16, 1775). Stay with Collider for the latest updates.
