The story we'll never know about Jane Austen

Throughout her life, the writer Jane Austen wrote many letters to friends and family. It is estimated that there were around 3,000. Years after her death, her sister Cassandra burned most of them. Only about 160 have survived. The loss of all this epistolary material has prevented a more in-depth study of the writer's personality and environment. But what has been perceived as a literary sacrilege has also served to inspire others to investigate the reasons behind the disappearance of her correspondence. Cassandra's family reputation would suffer if the letters were made public. This narrative void is what the series attempts to fill. Miss Austen (Movistar+), based on the novel by Gill Hornby and which explores the events that worried Jane's sister.

The fiction recovers real facts, characters, families and places to recreate the conflict surrounding this correspondence. And the result is a delightful production. Twenty years after the writer's death, Cassandra rushes to help her late fiancé's sister, who faces the death of her father. But the trip has a secret intention: to recover the letters that Jane wrote to the Fowle family. The series is full of flashbacks and time jumps. As the protagonist reads the correspondence, she recalls episodes from the past, when Austen sent her manuscripts to publishers in an attempt to publish them. Thus, the author's biography is reconstructed, and we understand the social and family context that influenced her novels. Furthermore, the fiction focuses on Cassandra's obsession with the memory of her sister and herself, and delves into a universe of tensions and biased interpretations of the family's past that the protagonist will try to redirect. However, at the same time, the four chapters of the BBC series trace a plot centered on Cassandra Austen and Isabella Fowle worthy of Austen's novels.

The series respects the narrative characteristics of the British writer and constructs a story starring perceptive and intelligent women who dialogue with each other and subtly question the norms that oppress them. Miss Austen cultivates the art of social observation and maintains the critical eye of the times. Love, marriage, female autonomy, and class differences are the basic ingredients of conflicts, which always occur in domestic settings and in small towns where what others say becomes an element of pressure. The reading aloud of some passages from Persuasion, by Jane Austen, serves as a background for some plots and causes the writer to influence the conscience and future of the characters with her stories. Miss Austen It has the elegance and prudence of a timeless period drama and knows how to perfectly balance the emotionality, which explodes especially in the final episode. The four episodes go by so quickly that, by the time you reach the end, you realize you'll miss the protagonists for days to come.