
Austen powers
The creative team behind PBS Masterpiece and the BBC’s period drama Miss Austen discuss how they have adapted Gill Hornby’s novel to shed light on a real literary mystery surrounding the life of Jane Austen.
For more than 50 years, television writers and producers have regularly turned to the novels of Jane Austen for inspiration. Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Emma, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey and her unfinished novel Sanditon have all made the jump to the small screen.
Four-part drama Miss Austen now continues television’s fascination with the author – but rather than another retelling of one of her novels, this series takes its inspiration from Austen’s own life.

Based on a real literary mystery – Cassandra Austen notoriously burning her famous sister Jane’s letters, much to the annoyance of Austen fans and academics – the story begins in 1830, many years after Jane’s death. Cassandra rushes to visit Isabella, the niece of her long-dead fiancé, who is about to lose her home following her father’s death.
But while seemingly visiting to support Isabella, Cassandra is really looking for a hidden bundle of private letters which, in the wrong hands, she fears could destroy Jane’s reputation. On finding them, Cassandra is then transported back to her youth, where young Cassy and Jane navigate the romances, family feuds and dashed hopes that shaped their lives – and laid the foundations for Jane’s stories.
Keeley Hawes (Bodyguard) stars as Cassandra, with Rose Leslie (Game of Thrones) as Isabella, Synnøve Karlsen (Clique) as young Cassy and Patsy Ferran (Life after Life) as Jane. They are joined by Phyllis Logan, Max Irons, Alfred Enoch, Jessica Hynes, Mirren Mack, Kevin McNally, Calam Lynch and Liv Hill.
Based on the novel of the same name by Gill Hornby, Miss Austen marks the first project from Bonnie Productions and reunites the writer and director behind the award-winning feature-length BBC drama adaptation Elizabeth is Missing.
Bonnie founder Christine Langan, the former head of BBC Films, had first read and acquired the rights to Hornby’s novel when it was at the manuscript stage and brought in Andrea Gibb to write the adaptation. Yet at the time, Langan felt getting a period drama commissioned in the UK was a “very slow and difficult process,” so she took the project to Susanne Simpson, the executive producer of PBS Masterpiece in the US, which has a tradition of buying and collaborating on British costume series.

“I simply gave her the book and she fell in love with it,” Langan tells DQ. Tom Mair later joined as script editor and they began imagining the series as a film in four parts that proved to be incredibly layered, with two timelines featuring separate character ensembles, numerous homes and residences – and numerous references to Austen’s novels.
“We were meticulous, and interrogated [the story], and wanted to make sure that we were writing about her, about bringing Cassandra to the front and telling her story as well as Jane’s,” Gibb says.
One of the first development projects led by Masterpiece, the team felt the full support of the commissioner knowing this was not a series that would likely become stuck in development hell. Director Aisling Walsh and producer Stella Merz then completed the central creative team and their involvement accelerated the project.
“We couldn’t have done it without each and every single one of us. [It was] proper, pure collaboration,” Gibb says. “That’s really rare. You’re in a raft in the middle of a big stormy sea with these people and you really need to cling on to them because the iceberg could be approaching. You’re so co-dependent and where one person begins, another ends, so you all bring your own individual thing to it. But at the same time it’s [about] the whole.”
“I read the scripts and then a whole other part of it starts, which is how you’re going to make it and who you are going to cast in it,” Walsh adds. “That’s a whole different journey. ‘How much money have you got? How can we do it?’”
The decision to de-age the Cassandra in the novels by 10 or 15 years for the series led Hawes, who is also an executive producer, to become the next key addition to the show.
But even with Masterpiece’s backing, Langan knew the production would need additional financial partners if they had a hope of bringing Miss Austen to the screen.

“We did not have a ton of money,” she admits. “Masterpiece were being as generous as they possibly could be, but we were going to have to find a UK broadcaster.” The BBC subsequently acquired the series in a deal with Federation Studios, the international distributor.
“We were putting it [the budget] together like a film,” says Langan of the fragmented financial plan. “In the end, I said to Aisling, ‘I’d hoped to tell you you’d have this much [money] but it’s not going to be this much. It’s going to be this much across four episodes.’ Brilliantly and kindly, she just said, ‘We’ll crack on, we’ll make that work.’
“That’s quite rare, that can-do front-footedness, seeing an opportunity and moving towards it. It was the year of the US writers and actors’ strikes [in 2023] and everything was up in the air and it was a very strange year. We probably got lucky because a lot of big American shows went on hiatus.”
With financial limitations to consider, the Miss Austen production team decided to keep things simple by opening their production office at Pinewood Studios and scouring potential locations that were all within a 30-mile radius of the Buckinghamshire facility, west of London.

“We went to see one place with the location manager, and we’re standing outside, saying, ‘This is what this could be. One chair, one dressing table, one mirror, that’s it. That’s the set,” Walsh says. “You have to buy into that feel of it.”
“It’s so unusual to meet someone [like Walsh] who says, ‘Yeah, I can do it for that money,’ and they actually can,” notes Merz.
Gibb picks up: “The simplicity and purity of it is its great strength. When you’re coming to it and think you’ll never do it for that [budget], actually, when you see it you think, ‘Why do people not do it like this?’”
“Everyone came to it loving it and wanting to get it made – the actors, and Aisling in particular,” Langan says. “If she’d been of a different temperament, it wouldn’t have been feasible.”
Additional contributors included production designer John Hand, costume designer Gill Horn and location scout Mark Gladwin. Filming then took place across 10 weeks at the end of 2023 and the start of 2024. The production even managed a limited but “genuine” location shoot, Langan says, as the cast and crew decamped to the English south coast for three days to film scenes set beside the sea – shooting days that were blighted by the prospect of snow and bitterly cold temperatures in early January but finished in a blaze of sunshine.
“That’s the challenge as well, to make it for that money in that timeframe, and I like that,” Walsh says of the tight filming schedule. “That’s the exciting thing about it. People get energised by it. We’d cast it, found locations and then spent two days in a room in Pinewood going through all four scripts. We were like, ‘We can’t have 45 horses or 12 carriages.’”

“All my babies were killed,” jokes Gibb, who restructured the series “a million times” with Walsh to find the perfect way to tell the story across the two time periods.
“What I feel sometimes is that people think adaptation is cutting and pasting, and it’s not. No way!” the writer says. “A friend of mine describes writing an original like you’ve got a big lump of clay pulling this story out of the clay, fashioning it for yourself, but when you’re adapting a book, you’ve got a lump of marble and you’re chipping away to reveal the essence of the story within it.
“But a book is not a screen story. It lives in a completely different place. A book is internal, a screen story is external, so you have to change and adapt and make [character] composites and find the key moments in the book. But also [you have to] make sure you then allow the essence of Gill’s book to never, ever be lost, but do your own thing. I had to put my own voice in there as well. So it’s a skill.”
One example of how the series tweaks the novel comes right at the start. In the book, Cassandra immediately knows she wants to find Jane’s letters and that she must make a decision that could protect her sister’s legacy. “But in a screenplay, if you have a character on page one knowing everything about what they want to do and then achieving it, there’s no drama,” Langan states. “The drama is in the journey. We just send her off with some intention.”

“We never did anything that Gill was not happy with, ever,” says Gibb. “She read everything as we went along. She’s watched all the cuts. It’s really important that if you are gifted a book, you have to make it yours. But at the same time, you have to be totally aware of the responsibility you have in order to keep the essence and the truth in what she wrote.”
That Hornby has written three novels set within the Austen family means she is well versed in the characters she is writing about, and in Miss Austen, Gibb uncovered numerous layers to the characters. She also admires the way Hornby uses Austen’s own work in her books.
“It’s the umbilical cord,” Langan agrees. “Hopefully, from this drama unfolding you can see where Jane will have seen all of her characters. All the potential of good marriages, bad marriages, eccentric characters falling on hard times – she was living it, we’re seeing it and you know which novels those themes entered into. But each of her novels is either referenced literally or metaphorically within it.”
Viewers will not just meet Jane the sister, however, but Jane the writer, with the series airing in the year that marks the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth. “There’s a lot of writing,” says Merz. “There’s not just one scene with a bit of nice music over it where she says, ‘Pride and Prejudice – done.’ You see her at her writing desk going from pillar to post, with inky fingers and pages of her writing paper everywhere all the time.”
Langan likens Cassandra to Jane’s agent and editor, someone who champions her work and reacts to it in real-time, reading novels chapter by chapter as they are handwritten.

“She’s kind of her muse as well, because one thing I didn’t realise was how much of her own life she mined for her books,” Gibb says. “We’re all vampires, writers, totally, and she happened to go, ‘I’ll take Mary Austen [played by Hynes] and make Mary Bennett. She’s annoying.’”
“And Cassandra is like Jane in Pride and Prejudice, the beautiful one,” Langan says. “Cassandra was known to be very attractive and had lots of virtues.”
Filming in real houses rather than studio builds gives Miss Austen – which debuts on BBC One and BBC iPlayer this Sunday before its Masterpiece debut on May 4 – an organic sense of pace and rhythm as characters flit between rooms, hallways and stairwells. Walsh’s hand-held camera, working with director of photography Si Bell, also brings a sense of realism to a piece that is full of wit and humour.
Yet it always remains a “classic” period drama, says Gibb. “That’s how we wanted to do it – Bridgerton and all that, fantastic, but we didn’t want to do it like that. We wanted to do something more classic and pure. That was a deliberate choice.
“But it’s incredibly modern because of the way the women are presented in our piece, their position in society and the whole notion of status and how women are subjected to the patriarchy. We think a contemporary female audience will really respond to that. That’s what we hope anyway, because they are very modern characters.”
That speaks to the ambition behind the piece, to tell a story that “transcends its time and speaks to a contemporary audience,” the writer continues. “We also wanted to make sure women had a voice. These invisible women of that time, older single women who were useful but thrown on the scrapheap. We wanted to give Cassandra her voice.”
“We wanted to tell a real story of sisterhood, not just blood ties, but friendship,” Langan says. “That’s not to say it’s just one monotone love-in, because obviously you can see the potential for disharmony within a group of women. There’s edge. But we wanted to tell our stories through the prism of Jane Austen and her sister as Gill has done.”
That they have achieved those goals is thanks to the fact that every member of the creative team knew what they were making from the outset. “In this instance, I can honestly say that we were all on the same page from day one,” Gibb adds. “We had the same sense and sensibility.”
tagged in: Aisling Walsh, Alfred Enoch, Andrea Gibb, BBC, Bonnie Productions, Calam Lynch, Christine Langan, Gill Hornby, Jane Austen, Jessica Hynes, Keeley Hawes, Kevin McNally, Liv Hill, Max Irons, Mirren Mack, Miss Austen, Patsy Ferran, PBS Masterpiece, Phyllis Logan, Rose Leslie, Synnøve Karlsen