If I write, It is a universally recognized truth that starting an essay with the words “it is a universally recognized truth” marks the writer as a person of taste and good humor who read Jane Austen, It is mainly to mark me like a person of taste and good humor who has, etc., etc. But it is a very recognized truth that we owe him more than this widely used openness.
Because the prose of Austen is so elegant and clear, his lively spirit, his comedy so dry, its irony so delicious, its acute observations, its heroines so indomitable, its novels have been living for two centuries. They offer a holiday destination for the mind, a world in which to lounge. Rich in characterization, convincing in their intrigues, fascinating in their social historicity, animated and made in their dialogue, his books, published from 1811, have the quality of the appearance both and ahead of their time, and they are particularly ripe for screen adaptation. Many readers see them in them the roots of modern romantic comedy.
And because there are only seven finished novels, three of them posthumous and one has never submitted for publication, and because we are a species that always wants more – or, says in another way, cannot leave well enough – the aclu (the cinematographic and literary universe of Austen) continues to develop with consequences, pastiches, modernizations and reinventations.
“Miss Austen”, “ A wonderful new series limited on the first Sunday on PBS “Masterpiece”, adopts a biographical fiction approach. Adapted by Andrea Gibb of Gill Hornby's novel in 2020, he focuses on Jane's sister, Cassandra – the title applies to one or the other sister – whose historical claim to glory or infamy, is that she burned most of Jane's letters after her death. (It is not made to be a nasty here.) He has a lot of qualities of a novel from Austen – because why otherwise? – Although we must adhere to the facts of real lives directs certain intrigues in a darker direction.
The series works in two deadlines, full of parallel action and mirror themes. In 1830, 13 years after the death of Jane Austen (Patsy Ferran), Cassandra (Keeley Hawes, deep and affecting) received a message that the husband of the late friend Eliza Fowle (Madeline Walker) was dying. Cassandra rushes to them, partly out of friendship – she is as good as a aunt to the girls of Eliza Isabella (Rose Leslie) and Beth (Clare Foster), who, like the Austens, seem to be on a path to the bachelor – and in part to put the hand on the letters of Jane in Eliza, in order to keep the future historians in safety, everything that is badly reinforced on her sister.
Also after the letters is Cassandra's sister-in-law, Mary (Jessica Hynes), who is also Eliza's sister, who thinks they could provide equipment for a book on her late husband, the brother of Austen James (Patrick Knowles). In any case, they are mainly a device to send Cassandra, who finds them and reads them secretly, in a series of flashbacks, some happy, some regrettable, because she reflects on her life with Jane and paths taken and not taken. Synnøve Karlsen plays the youngest Cassandra, and if I can say, recalls Jennifer Ehle, who played Elizabeth Bennet in front of Mr. Darcy de Colin Firth in the Peerless 1995 BBC “Pride and Prejudice”. (“You are my Lizzie Bennet at the root,” said Jane in Cassandra, seeming to agree with me.)
Each scenario also finds the austens and the moves moved from their homes in reduced circumstances. The parents of Austen – the optimistic father (Kevin McNally) and the somewhat hysterical mother (Phyllis Logan) – could easily serve as Mr. and Mrs. Bennet in an “pride and damage” adaptation, while the new vicar M. Dundas (Thomas Coombs), chasing the Fowles of their stay.
But the main push of the series is love and the sacrifice of self-signing, tangled with austene questions of marriage and financial security, both between Cassandra and Jane, and in the “current” scenario, Isabella and Beth Fowles. There is a lot of presumptuous twinning because the romantic possibilities go through the door and are sometimes shown: large, dark and anhistoric Henry Hobday (irons max) in the first case, described by Jane as “the perfection model, that if I can say is the most exasperated, for you last.
“I should know if she should get married!” Shouts Isabella, concerning Anne Elliot, the heroine of Jane's “persuasion”, whom Cassandra read aloud.
Jane Austen (Patsy Ferran) and the young Cassandra Austen (Synnøve Karlsen) in a scene of the imaginative historical drama “Miss Austen”.
(Robert Viglasky / Bonnie Productions and Masterpiece)
“Is it the only result that would be happy?” request Cassandra.
“Yes.”
“Oh, Isabella, there are so many other ways for women like us to find happiness,” explains Cassandra, highlighting the comparison between the two sisters. “Writing was Jane's greatest love; She comforted heroes a lot in her books. But in life, no man has ever been worthy. “
Like Isabella, the spectator has his own ideas of happiness, of course, and, everything that is equal would prefer a world in which romantic love comes to all. Again, few of us are geniuses dedicated first to work that will transcend time. And not to spoil what must be obvious to everyone except the characters, but the story of Fowles offers intelligent opportunities for a conclusion more in line with the Austen corpus.
The final should make you pass through a pack of handkerchiefs, unless you are a kind of heartless monster.
