In Miss Austen, Jane is sadly two-dimensional – so unlike her heroines

Whether it’s John Murray burning Lord Byron’s letters at Albemarle Street, Charles Dickens consigning his correspondence with Wilkie Collins to the flames, or Sylvia Plath’s personal journals disappearing under the stewardship of her husband Ted Hughes, acts of literary destruction have always intrigued us. They invite us to – almost literally – fill in the blanks. It is the starting point, too, for Gill Hornby’s 2020 novel Miss Austen, adapted now as a four-part BBC One period drama, and asking the simple question: why did Cassandra Austen destroy so many of her sister Jane’s letters?

Jane Austen (Patsy Ferran) is dead. Decades later, her spinster sister Cassandra (Keeley Hawes) discovers that Jane’s letters – in all their acerbic, revelatory glory – are about to fall into the hands of Cassandra’s sister-in-law, and rival, Mary (Jessica Hynes). By now, of course, Jane is well known for her novels, but the letters show “the real Jane Austen” – and Cassandra believes they must be burned. Through this imagined recreation of Austen’s secret letters, that were lost to history, we see the story of how the two young sisters – impish, cynical Jane and beautiful, earnest Cassandra (played, in her youth, by Synnøve Karlsen) – managed love, friendship and their most important relationship of all, family. “You and I will always be sisters,” Cassandra warns Jane. “You are saddled with me forever."

There is perhaps no author whose work adapts more naturally, or satisfyingly, for the screen than Austen. From the BBC’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in 1995 to Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning Sense and Sensibility in the same year; Emmas starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Romola Garai, and Anya Taylor-Joy; and tangential reworkings such as Clueless, Metropolitan and Bridget Jones’s Diary, Austen just works on screen.Miss Austen knows this: rather than playing as a straight biopic, it is fashioned to the conventions of Jane’s vision of Regency Britain. The relationship between Cassandra and Jane is pure Jane and Elizabeth Bennet (their parents also the mirror of the Bennet parents). A Mr Collinsesque vicar appears (“In my view [Jane] warrants a substantial biography,” he oozes) and unscrupulous sister-in-law Mary would give Sense and Sensibility’s Fanny a run for her money.

But while the drama has an almost metafictional awareness of Jane’s oeuvre, neither Hornby nor Andrea Gibb, who adapts the novel, can quite nail the author’s piercing satire. A tendency persists towards expository dialogue (people are endlessly referred to as “brother James” or “sister Mary”), which feels clumsy. Cassandra is a touch wet while Ferran’s Jane is full of a brisk energy that leaves her, counterintuitively, a bit flat. Attempts to rework Jane into a romantic heroine – such as 2007’s Becoming Jane, starring Anne Hathaway as Jane and Anna Maxwell Martin as Cassandra – have stumbled in the past. But the foregrounding of her novelistic ambitions, here, hits the same snag of making her rather two-dimensional, so unlike her heroines.

There are, quite naturally, few biographies of great writers that reach the heights of the subjects. It’s rather an unfair standard to hold them to. Miss Austen might not achieve the sororal interplay of the Dashwoods in Sense and Sensibility, the emotional range of Anne Elliot in Persuasion, or the romantic badinage of Mr Knightley and young Miss Woodhouse in Emma, but there’s still plenty to be admired. The show is filmed at some spectacular properties, the period detail lovingly evoked (even if the hair and make-up department take a rather more modern approach). Hawes and Karlsen are good fits as Russian doll Cassies, convincingly bridging an, often tricky, time gap. And the supporting cast, including Game of Thrones’s Rose Leslie and Harry Potter’s Alfred Enoch, build a handsome ensemble. It might satisfy Austen completists, but it ought to enchant stray viewers.

In a way, Miss Austen proves that we can never truly know Jane Austen. In part, that is because of Cassandra’s destructive act. This reconstruction of those doomed missives foregrounds the elder sister, possibly because it would be too sacrilegious to make the same sweeping assumptions about the woman on the £10 note. “You’re supposed to be the romantic one,” Cassandra rebukes her sister, but really it is Cassie, the unknown, unloved sister, who does the swooning, leaving Miss Austen as both biographical and dramatic marginalia.