To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video. Up Next. BBC’s new four-part period drama Miss Austen pays homage to one of England’s greatest authors Jane Austen, 250 years after her birth. There is a long and rich history of onscreen adaptations of Jane’s enduring love stories from BBC’s 1995 Pride and Prejudice adaptation starring Colin Firth to Netflix’s unique take on Persuasion with Dakota Johnson as our literary heroine.

But what about the author behind these romantic classics, that hold such a dear place in many people’s hearts?. Unsurprisingly, there is an intense fascination with the life experiences that might have inspired these books filled with yearning, unrequited love and fairytale endings. Sadly, nearly all we know about Jane’s life outside the pages of her novel has been lost after her sister, Cassandra, burned almost all her private letters just decades after the author’s early death in 1817.

So as the BBC marks this special quarter-of-a-century anniversary, how accurate are the events portrayed in the new series – Miss Austen?. Miss Austen is based on the hit 2020 novel by Gill Hornby and tells the story of the family through Jane’s sister Cassandra, who has been painted a villain in the eyes of many historians for her act of burning Jane’s letters. The show is split into two timelines, one in 1830 when Cassandra travels to the home the Fowle family home (old friends of the Austens) to get her hands on Jane’s correspondence, and eventually destroy it.

There we also meet the daughter of the house Isabelle Fowle who is readying to leave her family home with no plan for the future and unspoken feelings for the local physician, Lidderdale. The other timeline takes us into the past, decades earlier, when Cassandra is engaged to be married to Tom Fowle who is about to set off on a one-year voyage to earn funds for his future family. From there we see how their lives unfold, and their ever-changing bond as sisters.

A star-studded cast pulls this show together. British acting Keeley Hawes stars as an older Cassandra Austen opposite Vigil actor Rose Leslie as Isabelle Fowle, W1A star Jessica Hynes as Cassandra’s sister-in-law Mary Austen, Scottish star Mirren Mack as lady’s maid Dinah and How To Get Away With Murder’s Alfred Enoch as physician Lidderdale. In the past timeline, Clique actor Synnove Karlsen plays a younger Cassie alongside theatre star Patsy Ferran as Jane, Sweetpea’s Calam Lynch as Tom Fowle and Three Girls breakout star Liv Hill as a young Mary Austen.

The show also features Downton Abbey star, Phyllis Logan and Kevin McNally (known for Pirates of the Caribbean) play Mr and Mrs Austen. Later in the series, Condor actor Max Irons appears as Henry Hobday, a gentleman who meets the Austens while they are on holiday. Spoilers for Miss Austen ahead. Gill Hornby, and the BBC adaptation of her novel, blur fact and fiction to build the story of Jane and Cassandra’s lives.

As well as Cassandra, Jane had six brothers – James, George, Charles, Francis, Henry, and Edward – of whom James married Mary Lloyd (sister to Jane’s close friend Martha) and himself became a writer. In 1842 – just two years before her own death – Cassandra burned thousands of Jane’s letters, leaving only 160 behind to give a small glimpse into the life of her beloved, but private, sister (who herself died aged 41 in 1817).

In their youth, The Austen and Fowle family, who lived in Kintbury, knew one another. It is widely acknowledged that Jane was particularly close with Eliza Fowle who was one of the lucky recipients of the prolific writer’s musings. For Hornby, Miss Austen is a way to re-imagine the Austen sisters from the popular view, and, particularly, the assassination of Cassandra’s character – grounding her work in what she finds in the letters between the two.

In 2020, she told the i paper: ‘One of the things that annoys me about so many of the biographies is this notion of poor Jane, a spinster who longed for marriage. ‘Did she? There’s no evidence to suggest that. The other myth is that the last years of her life in Chawton were miserable, spent with dreary Cassandra, plain Martha and their mother – and that that’s why she wrote all this escapist stuff. Rubbish.’.

In her surviving letters, we get a glimpse into Jane’s flirty, witty personality such as her recounting of her short liaison with Irishman Tom Lefroy in December 1795, and this version of Jane comes through on screen. Elsewhere, the show depicts many events that truly did take place including Cassandra’s ill-fated engagement to Thomas Fowle in 1794 who died from yellow fever while on a trip to the Caribbean. She never married again in her lifetime.