Stately, sly and well-mannered: BBC1's Miss Austen reviewed

It is a truth universally acknowledged that lazy journalists begin every piece about Jane Austen with the words ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’, so I’ll fight the temptation.

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In any case, the Miss Austen at the centre of BBC1’s new Sunday-night drama isn’t Jane, but her beloved sister Cassandra, best known for destroying most of Jane’s letters. Given that this has rendered our knowledge of the woman’s biography tantalisingly sketchy, Cassandra has attracted her fair share of resentment from Janeites. But rather cunningly, Miss Austen both exonerates her and takes full advantage of the sketchiness: high-mindedly questioning our entitlement to snoop into Jane’s private life, while feeling free to speculate on what that private life might have been.

Not, of course, that the result is at all disrespectful to Britain’s most-loved novelist™. On the contrary, its chief characteristic is an abiding politeness.

This week’s opening episode began years after Jane’s death, when Cassandra (Keeley Hawes) was living with just a maid and her memories. But then a letter arrived from Isabella Fowle with news that her father Fulwar, husband of Cassandra’s late friend Eliza, was dying – and insisting in slightly pass-agg tones that Cassandra mustn’t put herself ‘to the inconvenience of making the long and arduous journey’ from Hampshire to neighbouring Berkshire to see him.

Sure enough, she set off immediately to fulfil ‘my last duty to dear Eliza’. Once she got there, however, it seemed her motives might be more mixed. Having learned that her brother James was planning a biography of Jane, she kept retreating from the hushed tones all around her to search through Eliza’s old bedroom and mutter: ‘Where are Jane’s letters?’ Having eventually found them, she was soon reading her way to a series of flashbacks where she, Jane and Eliza were inseparable friends.