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.
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.
The chief characteristic of Miss Austen is an abiding politeness
By now, a genuinely revisionist view of Jane would be as the gentle, unfailingly kind-hearted maiden aunt of Victorian imagining. But here again we were duly presented with the entertaining (and apparently surprising) sight of a feisty, waspish observer of the human comedy, especially when it came to the 18th-century equivalent of bridezillas. More touchingly, we also had the story of Cassandra’s engagement to her one true love, who died before they could get married.
Meanwhile, along with the intertwining of past and present came an equally deft mingling of Jane’s fiction with the real life we were seeing – presumably in order to suggest that she drew heavily on it. The financial plight of unmarried women was emphasised. A buffoonishly self-important clergyman expressed his love of her novels, particularly ‘Mansfield House’. For Jane’s mother, as for Mrs Bennet, ‘the business of her life was to get her daughters married’.
With its stately pace, sly humour and well-mannered dialogue, Miss Austen couldn’t be more of a contrast to the programme it’s replaced on Sunday nights. But while the satisfactions it provides may be more understated than those of SAS Rogue Heroes, satisfactions they remain nonetheless.
I’m guessing I wasn’t the only person who approached BBC1’s other big new show of the week with some nervousness. After all, Motherland wasn’t just one of the best sitcoms of recent times, but it also relied for its success on its strength as an ensemble piece. So could Amandaland – a spin-off featuring only one of the junior-school mums (plus sidekick) – be anything other than an anti-climax?
The answer so far is a firm ‘not as much as you might have feared’. For the uninitiated, Amanda (Lucy Punch) was the queen of the PTA back in the day: snobbish, overbearing and therefore regularly humiliated. A few years on, she’s still all three, but with attempts at added depth as her insecurities become even more obvious and explicable.
Following her divorce, she’s left the middle-class splendour of Chiswick for what she calls ‘SoHar’: an area south of Harlesden known to most other people as Wormwood Scrubs. She’s also had to take her children out of private school – although, in her continuing quest for the bright side, she noted that there’s ‘a better chance of getting to Oxbridge from a bog-standard state’. Happily for us – if not for her – she’s now back in touch with her ghastly, undermining mother, played by a scene-stealing Joanna Lumley.
On the whole, faced with the challenge of a spin-off, the writers have opted to make everything broader: the comedy, the humiliations, the booziness of middle-class English life. But if subtlety is in short supply, fun isn’t. Granted, the sense of a programme trying just a bit too hard means that all the people waiting to say ‘Not as good as Motherland’ can go ahead. Even so, the first episode did enough to suggest that it’s possible to be not as good as Motherland and still give viewers a pretty good time.
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