Reviews: Jane and football

TELEVISION: Sister act

On a cold blue day at the beginning of February, I visited Jane Austen’s house at Chawton in Hampshire. This homely little place with its extraordinary literary heritage – concentrated on the tiny circular table by the window where Jane completed six of the greatest novels in the English language – feels only recently vacated. Perhaps the Austens have just popped to Alton on their donkey carriage (also available to view!).

And yet there’s a melancholy in those cheerfully wallpapered rooms. Jane, her sister Cassandra, their mother, and their friend Martha Lloyd lived in the cottage, moving there on their wealthy brother Edward’s invitation following their father’s death and a decade of moving from place to place. The irony is not lost on visiting, with Edward’s Chawton House itself a little way up the road (also well worth a visit): this lucky brother, picked as a boy by his relations the Knights for adoption, had two sprawling estates, while the women of his family were reduced to renting small rooms in Southampton, Bath, and elsewhere.

Here is where the story of Miss Austen, the BBC’s dramatic contribution to Jane’s 250th birthday celebrations, begins: Cassandra Austen (Keeley Hawes) leaving the safety of Chawton to stay at Kintbury, in Berkshire, with Isabella Fowle, the daughter of her and Jane’s old friend Eliza. Gill Hornby’s 2020 novel of the same name has now been dramatised with a stellar cast including the quietly complex Rose Leslie (Isabella) beside the reliably brilliant and subtle Hawes.

This is a tale of two timelines and two faces: in Austenian style, our expectations of each character are gradually turned on their heads. Cassandra is ostensibly visiting Isabella to help care for her dying father, Fulwar, but she is really going because she knows history is to repeat itself. The Austens’ beloved childhood home at Steventon was usurped by her brother and his rather trying wife Mary (Jessica Hynes) when he succeeded his father as the new rector of the parish. The Austen daughters – two among six brothers – were unmarried and accompanied their parents away from their childhood home, while also being at the disposal of their brothers’ wives for such useful auntly duties as they required. But they fell on difficult times, and Jane – a homebird, deeply attached to a sense of place and desperately in need of routine, not least for her writing – suffered, mentally and physically, with each move. Cassandra is desperate for Isabella not to suffer the same fate. But she is also on a mission: to retrieve letters she and her late sister wrote to Eliza. The mystery that has long puzzled and agonised Austen fans is why Cassandra destroyed Jane’s missing letters (only about 160 survive out of an estimated 3,000).

Reading Hornby’s novel a few months ago, Cassandra’s stoicism paired with Jane’s ability to fathom happy endings amid such difficulties particularly moved me. What a bond between two different sisters – like Lizzy and Jane, or Elinor and Marianne – and what efforts of one to preserve the spotless legacy of the other. Cassandra becomes Jane’s truest champion after her early, tragic death aged 41, and we realise how much she needs to seize this one chance to salvage and destroy these letters, which contain so many chapters of the Austen story she wishes to remove from their narrative. As she examines each letter, we are swept back into the absorbing tale of the younger Cassandra (played by Synnøve Karlsen) and Jane (Patsy Ferran). We see Jane through Cassandra’s eyes, and yet, we already have: the only existing portrait of Jane is Cassandra’s work.

The central question: in the early nineteenth century, how is a woman deemed too old to be married to find her own way in the world, poor and comparatively disregarded as she is likely to be? This applies to Jane and Cassandra in their youth, and to Isabella and her sisters in the present. It even applies to Mary Austen, a widow with too many opinions for her own good. And it applies to Mary’s stepdaughter Anna, Jane and Cassandra’s niece. The answer comes in an invigorating celebration of sisterly love and the friendships between women and girls (with the odd reading from Persuasion). Everyone has a bigger story to tell. Even Mary Austen has her good side. The women are older than they were in the days of those letters, and there is pathos in the possibility they may never meet again. Cassandra’s story is worth telling: a long life, full of art, love, pain, and the everyday moments in between, lived in service of her family

Matilda Warner

Miss Austen is available on BBC iPlayer.

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BOOKS: At the match

It’s an awkward business to fictionalise sport. What looks like a good hook for a story – with built in drama, structure, emotion – comes out of the wall unless you have the stuff to stick it in place. The conceit of George Harrison’s debut Season is a Premier League season ticket: 38 chapters, one for each match of the campaign, and two men brought together by their neighbouring seats in the stand. Such a lovely set up demands a lot in the execution.

The Old Man has an ailing wife and the Young Man has a fragile girlfriend, and they both have the team, a slightly-anonymised Norwich, another character as an inscrutable God might be. What matters is not that the two men meet at or even go to every game (they don’t), but that those moments allow their ordinarily lonely lives into another. Both think of the football as a necessary distraction, but without it their “real” lives would scarcely touch the sides.

Harrison can, vitally, write the football – not exhaustive detail of fantastical matches, but the telling glimpses that in the telling betray whether somebody was at the match or just watched it all back on a screen. He can do the language too, carefully rendering the platitudes with which fans express profundities. The match gives meaning to words just as the season can give a life a semblance of shape. He is too hasty to explain what they are, when inarticulacy can speak for itself. I understood best when Harrison did his talking on the pitch.

Patrick Hudson

Season is published by Lightning at £14.99

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