The 'Miss Austen' Trailer Promises a Heartfelt Story of Sisterhood

Though Jane Austen's classic novels are primarily remembered for giving us beloved literary romances like Lizzie Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy or Eleanor Dashwood and Edward Ferrars, her stories also contain love stories of a different variety: The unshakeable bond between sisters. This is the relationship at the heart of the forthcoming Masterpiece drama Miss Austen, which tells a story of the author's relationship with her sister Cassandra and the literary mystery that still surrounds the eldest Austen sibling today.

Based on the novel by Gil Hornby, the limited series offers a dramatized imagining of what caused Cassandra Austen to burn an extensive collection of her sister's personal letters after her death. The generally accepted wisdom among many scholars and Austenites is that Cassandra acted to protect her sister's reputation by preventing potentially private or embarrassing personal details from becoming public knowledge. What those details were is a question that's now lost to time, but Miss Austen aims to make a go at answering it.

Told across dual timelines that bridge the past and present, Miss Austen follows the story of an older Cassandra (Keeley Hawes) on a visit to Isabella Fowle (Rose Leslie), the niece of her long-dead fiance, to reclaim the letters she believes to be in her possession. As she is forced to reckon with her sister's legacy and her own past, flashbacks tell the story of Jane and Cassandra's youth, full of the romantic entanglements, heartbreak, and family drama that would help make Jane's stories so famous.