Keeley Hawes Is a Jane Austen Heroine in ‘Miss Austen’ Trailer
The Regency interval drama style continues to have a chokehold on viewers within the yr 2025. Between anxiously ready for extra information from Bridgerton Season 4 to the provision of interval items being obtainable on streaming, followers have an limitless stream of the style at their fingertips by their most popular streaming suppliers. Now, based mostly on the novel by Gill Hornby, we’re getting a contemporary entry into the style: Miss Austen. The Masterpiece on PBS miniseries stars Keeley Hawes as Cassandra Austen, older sister to the well-known writer, Jane Austen who gave us well-known works: Pleasure and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, and extra. The trailer appears to comply with twin timelines, one among Cassandra within the current, performed by Hawes, someday after Jane Austen’s loss of life in 1817 and likewise when Jane was nonetheless alive, and the sisters have been younger girls. Patsy Ferran performs Jane and Synnøve Karlsen performs a younger Cassandra. The logline is as follows:
“Miss Austen takes a literary thriller – Cassandra Austen notoriously burning her well-known sister Jane’s letters – and reimagines it as an interesting, witty and heart-breaking story of sisterly love, whereas creating in Cassandra a personality as fascinating as any Austen heroine.”
The Sisterhood of ‘Miss Austen’
Jane and Cassandra have been the one daughters of George and Cassandra Austen. In whole, the Austens had eight kids, with Cassandra and Jane being the fourth and sixth respectively. Neither lady married. Cassandra, a watercolorist, famously burned Jane’s letters posthumously. Within the trailer, a personality in voiceover is presumably telling Cassandra that Jane “understood the affairs of the center higher than anybody.” We do see romance within the trailer, seemingly between Rose Leslie and Alfred Enoch‘s characters. Max Irons (The Spouse), Calam Lynch (Bridgerton), and Phyllis Logan (Downton Abbey) additionally star within the four-part sequence.
It is estimated that Jane wrote 3,000 letters to her sister, and solely lower than 200 survive. The majority have been burned or destroyed, and the surviving letters have been censored by Cassandra to disguise something of impropriety or would paint the Austen household in a adverse gentle. Whereas the sequence appears to romanticize the connection between Jane and Cassandra, will probably be fascinating to see how Cassandra concludes to do one thing like that to Jane’s phrases, the remaining items of her sister, after she’s handed. To see Hawes’s Cassandra make that call might paint her as much less of an Austen heroine and extra as a morally grey character.
Miss Austen premieres Might 4 on PBS, in the identical yr celebrating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s delivery (December 16, 1775). Stick with Collider for the most recent updates.
