Miss Austen - BBC1

[witchycat2]

All episodes are now up on iplayer. It airs weekly on Sunday at 9:05pm from tonight.

I love a period drama. I've watched the first episode on iplayer and liking it so far.

Synopsis below from BBC:

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.
The drama begins in 1830, many years after Jane has died. Cassandra (Keeley Hawes) rushes to visit Isabella (Rose Leslie), the niece of her long-dead fiancé, who is about to lose her home following her father’s death. Cassandra is ostensibly there to help Isabella, but her real motive is to find a hidden bundle of private letters which, in the wrong hands, she fears could destroy Jane’s reputation. On discovering them, Cassandra is overwhelmed as she is transported back to her youth. In flashbacks, we meet Young Cassy (Synnøve Karlsen) and Jane (Patsy Ferran) as they navigate the romantic infatuations, family feuds and dashed hopes which shaped their lives, and laid the foundations for Jane’s unforgettable stories. Cassandra’s re-evaluation of her past eventually leads her to find a way to guide Isabella towards the path of true happiness.

Just ordered it, 57p ,what a bargain 🤣

Wow! Bought mine many years ago for the princely sum of £8.99.
Hope you enjoy reading it 😊

Some quotes from Jane's letters that you might enjoy...

"At the bottom of Kingsdown Hill we met a gentleman in a buggy, who, on minute examination, turned out to be Dr. Hall -- and Dr. Hall in such very deep mourning that either his mother, his wife, or himself must be dead."
https://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/brablet3.html#letter18

[At a ball:] "Mrs. B. and two young women were of the same party, except when Mrs. B. thought herself obliged to leave them to run round the room after her drunken husband. His avoidance, and her pursuit, with the probable intoxication of both, was an amusing scene."
https://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/brablet5.html#letter31

"but poor woman! how can she honestly be breeding again?"
https://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/brablet9.html#letter43

[On Mrs. Deede's giving birth to another child:]
"I would recommend to her and Mr. D. the simple regimen of separate rooms."
https://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/brablt15.html#letter82

More quotes and letters (about 2/3 of her letters in this edition) here:
https://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/brablets.html#letterqot

Can anyone recommend the definitive biography for an almost lifelong JA fan but never read any biography of her?

I only know of this one:

www.amazon.co.uk/Jane-Austen-Life-Claire-Tomalin/dp/0241963273

I've always thought it was the main one. But I think there is another one.

I've read them all and I rate Claire Tomalin's as the best one.

Definitely Claire Tomalin.

Though there’s another great Austen book I always recommend to all JA fans, Maggie Lane’s Jane Austen and Food. I’m not sure it’s in print any more, but it should be easily findable secondhand. It’s about food and dining in the novels, and its significance as JA’s contemporary readers would have understood it (why it’s significant Lizzy Bennet prefers a plain dish to a ragout, what it says about Longbourn and Netherfield that their breakfasts happen at such different times that Lizzy has time to get Jane’s letter at breakfast and walk three miles cross-country and still get to Netherfield while they’re still at breakfast, the food mentioned at various houses, what it says about the Bates in Emma that they send food to the communal oven) and the food culture of the Austens’ households, and things JA says in letters about foods she considered luxurious.

I imagine that just slipped through by mistake, not that Cassandra spared it deliberately! I imagine the destroyed letters had more of the spiky humour you see in her juvenilia. I mean, she grew up one of two girls essentially living in the middle of a boys’ boarding school, and in a big extended family where she was privy to her aunt being tried for theft, her racy Indian-born cousin (and later SIL) Eliza, possibly the natural daughter of Warren Hastings, widow of a guillotined aristocrat, and the model for the predatory Lady Susan and Mary Crawford, and just lots of births and deaths.

What I've been loving as we've gone along with this beautifully written, acted and filmed series is that it is clear that Jane's tongue was sharper than we used to imagine and that it's sharpness is also glorious and wonderful. I wish the letters hadn't been destroyed but I understand why they were. My understanding is that the letters were destroyed when we got into the Victorian era when that sort of talk would have been considered beyond shocking and would have destroyed Austen's reputation. Cassandra would also probably have to think of money but mostly I think she did it out of love for her sister. It's interesting because seven years after Jane's death, Lord Byron died and his reputation was scandalous even when he was alive but into the Victorian era he was the devil incarnate to many - to be fair he saw himself that way a bit, but whatever - but that didn't stop his fame/infamy from growing or his poetry from selling. A woman with a sharp tongue's books would have stopped selling because despite people reading the books and, my god she's so sharp in them all, still decided that as a nice young single woman she was proper and sweet and everything a Victorian woman should be. Men can get away with incest and everyone is still "Bring it on Don Juan!" A woman is hilarious about ugly men and annoying women and she would be cancelled and maybe forgotten. Imagine that. No Jane Austen. <shudder>

Oh and Mary Austen is the most awful woman ever! I need to re-read all the novels and spot which utter witch she is in each of the books.

Thank you for all of the Claire Tomalin recommendations and thanks to you Serpenting for the food recommendation.

I had a similar cookery companion to the early series of Mad Men and learned so much about the era through 1950s and early 1960s food customs.

I honestly don’t think so. It’s more a family being protective of a deceased family member’s reputation, to the extent promoting a sanitised version of her — especially as the younger generation, living into the Victorian era, were sniffy about her embarrassing, not quite genteel, old-fashioned ways, talking about being allowed to drink as much wine as she liked once she was no longer considered marriageable etc..

I research much more obscure women writers from the late 19th and early to mid-20thc and it’s still a problem, with families often destroying or suppressing material, as much out of concern for the family name as an individual (female) reputation. Obviously we now like images of rebellious, outspoken women writers chafing at their confines and we’re probably far less perturbed at the idea of JA being in love with Tom Lefroy than her writing something cruel about an acquaintance’s stillbirth.

(The family of one writer who died in the 1970s would never allow a scholar who wrote about lesbian themes in her work (and the fact that her female partners had been an established fact in her life) to quote work or use images they held the rights to, and this was the case a few years ago. And the great-grandsons of one writer I’ve done some work on will not let me consult her journals, and only permitted a heavily-edited selection to be published by a family member some time ago.)

Even Byron’s friends burned his memoirs after his death!

Another thing to regret is the letters to Frank her brother who lived a long life and lovingly preserved a number of her letters but somehow failed to pass them on to anyone intelligent enough to preserve them. His daughter, inexplicably, got rid of them; just beyond depressing .

reveriesunderthesignofausten.wordpress.com/2012/05/30/who-destroyed-jane-austens-letters-to-frank-her-brother-and-her-letters-to-martha-lloyd-her-beloved-friend/

This is from the above site

Frances Sophia Austen called Fanny (1821-1904).

Upon the father dying, she apparently rushed to destroy his and Jane’s letters. She really left not a moment and consulted no one. Frank had kept these letters near him all his life (Southam, JA and the Navy).
Claire Tomalin also describes this bizarre loss.

Also a lot of the family seemed to be clergyman which might explain everyone wanting to sanitize her image.

Another fascinating literary burning is Ted Hughes's destruction of Sylvia Plath's journals after she took her own life.

As her executor he wrote that he didn't want her children to have to read them. I wonder whether he didn't want anyone at all to read them because of what they must have contained about him?

Regardless of any of his distress at their contents - he knew, to an extent, her significance as a writer and the destruction of her journals still shocks me. He could have sealed them until after his death surely. Any way, what a piece of work he was.

Sorry, I should say - her final journals.

Now, there's a sentence - 'Any way, what a piece of work he was'. I cannot de-rail by asking you to enlarge. Smiley

I'd love to discuss that with you on another thread - let me know if you're interested 📚

Totally up for a Plath thread.

Where is the best place? Chat? I couldn't find a poetry thread 😆

Start a thread in Books? Or What We’re Reading?

I’m loving this, and Jane is exactly as I would have wanted her to be.

“I shall be in pig for the rest of my life.” 😂

Serpenting
Ive made a thread on 'what we're reading' xxx
Sorry to this thread!
X

I've just finished it all. I think the fictional Mr Hobday went to see if Cassandra still had any feelings for him implying he would drop his fiancée (scandalous and highly unlikely) . That's the way I saw it anyway. I'm glad the Isabella and Mr Lidderdale story was true though.

I’m thoroughly enjoying the bonkers sister too, with her pipe.

I assume Cassandra was very financially comfortable by the time Miss Austen is set, but she didn’t appear to be revelling in the wealth from Jane’s works. WDYT?