Is Miss Austen on BBC based on a true story?
We love a good period drama and if you need the Bridgerton-shaped hole in your life filled then we have just the show. Miss Austen debuts on BBC One and iPlayer today (in fact all episodes are available to stream in one go) and tells the story of Jane Austen's older sister Cassandra.
The four-part series goes between two timelines, the first is the "present" timeline in 1840, where Cassandra is visiting the vicarage of an old family friend, long after her sister Jane's death and decides whether she should burn or keep her sister's correspondence. There's then the timeline in the "past" where Cassandra and Jane are younger, and we see them go through love and heartbreak, and the moments that then impact Cassandra's decisions in the present timeline.
But how much of the story is actually based in reality? Here's what you need to know about the inspiration behind Miss Austen.
Is Miss Austen based on a true story?
The BBC's drama series Miss Austen is based on Gill Hornby's 2020 novel of the same name.
The novel's official blurb reads as follows: "Throughout her lifetime, Jane Austen wrote countless letters to her sister. But why did Cassandra burn them all?
"1840: twenty three years after the death of her famous sister Jane, Cassandra Austen returns to the village of Kintbury, and the home of her family's friends, the Fowles. She knows that, in some dusty corner of the sprawling vicarage, there is a cache of family letters which hold secrets she can never allow to be revealed.
"As Cassandra recalls her youth and her relationship with her brilliant yet complex sister, she pieces together buried truths about Jane's history, and her own. And she faces a stark choice: should she act to protect Jane's reputation, or leave the contents of the letters to go unguarded into posterity?"
While of course we can't know exactly what happened in 1840, the overarching story and characters of the series are all based in fact, but some parts of the series and the book it's based on are dramatised.
The series writer, Andrea Gibb, who adapted Hornby's novel explained they looked to history a lot in the creation of the TV show.
" What Gill Hornby has done in her amazing book that we’ve adapted, is pull together all of the historical facts that we have about Jane and her family set-up, and fashion it into this amazing story of the bond between those two sisters and their importance to each other," she said.
Did Cassandra Austen really burn her sister's letters?
The main plot of the series is Cassandra deciding whether or not to get rid of her sister's letters. In real life Cassandra did burn the majority of Jane's letters, many years after her younger sibling's death in 1817.
According to the Jane Austen House, Cassandra burnt her sister's letters after her death in order to protect Jane's "memory and reputation". Jane's remaining letters, there are believed to be just 161 in existence, were then distributed amongst her brothers' descendants and her writing admirers.
Now her letters are in a variety of private and public collections. There are 13 at Chawton House, where Jane once lived and is open to the public.
Which characters in Miss Austen are based on true historical figures?
The majority of the characters in Miss Austen both the series and the novel are based on real life figures who existed in history.
The Austens, Fowle family and the Lloyd family are all known, however there's not a lot that we do know about Cassandra Austen.
We do know Cassandra was three years older than Jane and the pair were incredibly close. She was engaged to Tom Fowle aged 19, however the pair never married as he died while on an expedition to the Caribbean, and she remained unmarried for the rest of her life.
Cassandra was with Jane when was taken unwell and stayed with her until her death. Cassandra lived at Chawton House after Jane's death, where she lived with her dog called Link and taught the girls in the village to read and sew.
The real Cassandra died aged 72 in 1845.
Miss Austen is available on BBC One and BBC iPlayer now
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