Why Did Jane Austen's Siblings Burn Her Letters?

 

Austen is one of the greatest writers in the English language – but relatively little is known about her. And that's in part because of an act that infuriates many to this day, which is the subject of new TV drama Miss Austen.

In early January 1796, 20-year-old Jane Austen wrote a gossipy letter to her beloved older sister, Cassandra. It had news of Jane's current crush, "a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man". Tom Lefroy was an Irish lawyer with whom Jane had cut a rug at three balls. She playfully urged her sister: "Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together." She was already looking forward to their next encounter and she wrote again to Cassandra just a few days later. In this letter, she offered to let their friend Mary have "all my other admirers" because she had eyes only for Tom. However, Tom had to leave the country and in the same note she wrote: "At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over. My tears flow as I write at the melancholy idea."

These letters, the earliest of Jane's that we have, suggest a vivacious, flirtatious, funny young woman who enjoys parties and dancing and the attention of the opposite sex. It's a vivid picture, and all the more precious because so few of Jane's letters survive. She was a prolific correspondent, estimated to have written thousands of letters during her lifetime, and yet we have only 160 of them. Years after Jane's death in 1817 from an unknown illness, Cassandra, to whom her sister had written most days when they were apart, burned almost all of her letters.

Her deed has puzzled and infuriated historians and biographers. Jane Austen is one of the greatest writers in the English language, second only to Shakespeare in the view of many. Her six novels – witty, withering and psychologically perceptive, pioneering in form and content – are still hugely popular today, as are screen adaptations, of which there are many. Yet beyond basic biographical facts, information about Jane is relatively scant. Was she, as has been claimed, a secret radical? A lesbian? Poisoned? How much more would we know about her had Cassandra, her main champion in life and the keeper of her flame after her death, preserved her letters? What secrets must they have held that Cassandra thought it best to burn them?

The different theories

This mysterious act of destruction is investigated in Miss Austen, a new four-part television drama based on Gill Hornby's best-selling and critically acclaimed novel of the same name. Years after Jane's death, Cassandra (Keeley Hawes) has travelled to the village of Kintbury, in Berkshire, where the Austen family's friends, the Fowles, lived. Cassandra is, ostensibly, there to help Isabella Fowle (Rose Leslie), whose father Fulwar is dying. However this is a house that holds many bitter-sweet memories for her (in real life, this is where she had been staying when Jane wrote to her about Tom Lefroy), and she has an ulterior motive. She wants to retrieve some letters written by the late Jane to their friend Eliza Fowle, Isabella's mother, which she fears might contain details damaging to the novelist's legacy. When she finds the correspondence, it revives powerful memories of the events of years ago. The series takes place in two timelines – in 1830 –  with the unmarried Isabella facing eviction from her home after her father's death and Cassandra trying to protect her sister's legacy – and decades previously, with young Cassandra (Synnøve Karlsen) and Jane (Patsy Ferran) navigating romances, family problems, and the ups and downs of life.

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Author: Neil Armstrong, BBC