Keeley Hawes on Miss Austen: 'I wanted a change from police dramas and stories of murdered women'

Keeley Hawes: "I was sent the script for the first episode the summer before last – I wasn’t familiar with Gill’s book – started reading and couldn’t stop. And didn’t stop. And went straight through. Then said, 'Can I have some more?' And then ordered the book. Which was all a good sign. Then I whipped through the book at the same speed. And laughed my head off. And sobbed. And then just said, 'Yes!'

"It was exactly the sort of thing that I had been hoping for. For a while, I just did quite dark police dramas – lots of women being murdered. That sort of thing has been the fashion, but I have been talking to agents saying I’d love something different. Miss Austen is a love story between sisters, not about men. And it’s just magic."

Gill Hornby: "It is a love story. Thank you for noticing that. I have to say, when I heard that Keeley was on board I had a little cry. Some weird old possibilities had wandered past in the preceding four years that made me think, 'Oh my God, no, please!' But the minute they said your name, I just thought, 'It’s going to happen.' Because nothing ever happens in this business. So many books get bought, but they don’t get anywhere. It just felt like a gift. And I knew you were my Cassandra."

Hawes: "Well, I had to do very little. The story had just been so meticulously researched, it was like a beautiful gift being handed over. And when that happens… there’s your character."

Gill, what drove you to tell the story of Cassandra in your novel?

Hornby: "I’ve always been obsessed by women in history who have had their paths obstructed and have had to re-invent themselves. And that’s what those Austen girls had to do. They were both supposed to get married – probably to a churchman, like their mother – but it didn’t happen for either of them. And so they had to live by their wits. It was Cassandra’s wits, really, that carried Jane through.

"And yet all of Jane’s biographers hate Cassandra because she burnt Jane’s letters. But I read the surviving letters – there are 161 of them – and what really struck me was Jane’s utter adoration of Cassandra. Jane thought Cassandra was marvellous, couldn’t live without her and died in her arms. Keeley is absolutely right. It is a love story. It’s a love story between two sisters.

"They shared a bedroom all their lives. They were so close, and the rest of the world felt quite excluded. I also wanted to make the case for the spinster life, because the other great trope about Jane is that she wrote these great romances but never had a love of her own. Poor old spinster Jane! But she wasn’t like that in the least – it was a good result for her not marrying. If she had, she wouldn’t have written more than a letter.

"And it was Cassandra who enabled her to not marry. Cassandra had a small inheritance to keep them going, and then they had these other spinster friends who joined them. One of my favourite expressions, actually, is 'a spinster cluster'. In Georgian times, if a spinster had £10 it was nothing, but if four of them all had £10 and they put it in the pot, they had £40 and could have a house. And because so many men had died in the Napoleonic Wars, the spinster cluster cropped up a lot.

"It’s a detrimental sort of expression. But they were really happy – happier than they’d have been marrying not for love; happier than they’d have been dying in childbirth. And we know Jane wouldn’t have survived childbirth, because she didn’t survive being 41. Jane also littered her text with spinster ladies – she demands our consideration of them, like Miss Bates in Emma or Mrs Smith in Persuasion."

Why do you think Cassandra burnt Jane’s letters?

Hornby: "I think one reason was Jane’s great periods of melancholy, which the family is always trying to cover up. And actually, perhaps they didn’t even know. I also think their sisters-in-law were a great plague and trial to both of them, so there would have been a lot of family bitching, and Cassandra would have worried that [the letters] would hurt people’s feelings."

Hawes: "Ultimately, it has protected Jane, made her more of an enigma. She’s kind of a blank canvas."

Hornby: "She’s the perfect celeb. Because we can never know too much. She’s like God – you can put anything you want to into her. You can have your own view of who Jane Austen is, because there’s no way of disproving anything. An awful lot of people think she’s Lizzie Bennet. I don’t think she was Lizzie Bennet at all, not at all, but they are confused in people’s minds."

Hawes: "It’s that wonderful thing, when an actor is anonymous and they keep their private lives to themselves. Which is more and more difficult these days, because you have to do press and it’s all about social media. There’s a real hunger for it all, and it sells films, it sells books – but actually, when you are able to project onto that actor, it’s so much more powerful than sitting watching something and going, 'I know who they are married to'. And, like you say, we can project onto Jane completely."

Hornby: "Legacy management was a thing. That’s something we will never, ever have, because we’ve littered ourselves all over the place. People’s phones will be full of the gibberish we were WhatsApping for decades to come."

And Jane wrote anonymously because she didn't want to be famous, did she?

Hornby: "That is the proof that Cassandra was doing exactly what Jane would have wanted. Jane never used her name and published under the anonymous 'by a lady'. The people in the village didn’t know that she’d written the books they were reading. Her nieces and nephews didn’t know. Fame was a totally different concept in those days. And she was an extremely respectable, modest churchman’s daughter, and the idea of being known… The younger generation today do not see a downside to fame. People want to be famous for any old stupid reason."

Hawes: "The reality is, it can be uncomfortable. It’s so difficult because it all goes hand in hand. I live a fairly anonymous life, but it’s inevitable – you want to do work that people see, and then you go to Tesco and people say, 'Hello!' and feel that they know you. But generally, it’s very positive – 'Mrs Durrell!' they mostly say.

"People really relate to Mrs Durrell. She’s a single mother. She did something extraordinary. She was a woman ahead of her time – like the Austen sisters, actually – and people come up and say, 'Gosh, she’s like my mother.' Or, 'I’m a single parent, I lost my husband, I brought up my children.' It makes you feel really proud."

Do you hope Miss Austen will redeem Cassandra's reputation?

Hornby: "I hope so, yes. Keeley and I were talking about this before. Everybody looks at the Austen family – there were eight children – with this one remarkable woman who is still entertaining us 250 years later at the heart of it. But that’s not what it felt like to them. She wasn’t the most remarkable person in the family – Cassandra was the top dog!

"Jane is only the famous one retrospectively, because although she died at 41, she lived long enough to see her success dwindle almost to nothing. She didn’t really bounce back [into favour] until towards the end of the 19th century. And we really should be on our knees with gratitude that Cassandra did what she did for Jane, because she kept her going."

Hawes: "What I thought was very unusual was that the Austen family encouraged Jane to write."

Hornby: "Her father had a library of 5,000 books at the Steventon Rectory, so as soon as she could read, Jane was allowed to clamber into an armchair in the library and read anything. There were no strictures at all. Her father was also running a school upstairs. He wasn’t teaching the girls, but they just picked it up by osmosis.

"Jane was much the cleverest in the family – and they were a brilliant family. Her dad recognised that, and he was the one who sent off her first draft of Pride and Prejudice to a publisher when she was 21 because he thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever read. Unfortunately, it came back return of post. It wasn’t published until after he died."

Hawes: "Isn’t it amazing that he did that?"

Hornby: "Yes, he was a very broad-minded, extraordinary man. And their home was a cradle of creativity. They would all write something during the day and then in the evening, their entertainment was sitting around the fireside and reading what they had written. Of course, people then were all in the same room after supper because you can’t heat every room. So, everyone would be gathered around, sparking off one another. It was pretty amazing in that respect. Heaven. Heaven."

Gill, your brother Nick is also an author — was your home like the Austens'?

Hornby: "No, it wasn’t that kind of environment. Our parents left school when they were 16, so we didn’t really have any books. But we went to the library every week. And back then the TV was only on half the day."

Hawes: "I remember we would do little plays and my brother Jamie would be the donkey and I’d sit, because I was the youngest of four, on his back and go into the living room. We did have a TV, but if you did watch something, you did it less mindlessly. You had it on for a reason. It’s why EastEnders was bringing in 19 million viewers a week – it was something everybody sat down to watch."

Keeley, how do you feel about Cassandra now you've played her?

Hawes: "I love Cassandra. I just loved going to work and spending all day with her. I would happily have gone on and done another series. I missed her when we finished. She was extraordinary. She’s clever and funny and loyal. But not too good to be true. And her story is just heartbreaking."

Hornby: "How did you feel wearing black and grey all the time?"

Hawes: "I quite liked it. I wear a lot of black anyway. And it’s lovely wearing a corset."

Hornby: "Really? I thought it would be really uncomfortable. Should we bring them back?"

Hawes: "Someone told me that the actresses on Bridgerton were trying to get rid of the corsets… well, that’s half the character there, really, because whether you like it or not, you are reminded all the time of where you are. And it was such a beautiful period. I like that it’s quite austere. I’d happily do more Austen."

Hornby: "Have you never been in an Austen adaptation before?"

Hawes: "I’ve never been in an Austen. My husband [Matthew Macfadyen, who played Mr Darcy in the 2005 film version of Pride and Prejudice] has done that part of things for me!"

Hornby: "The appetite is bottomless for Austen adaptations, but it’s so limited because she only wrote six novels. Which makes this drama special – you get the whole feel and world of Austen, but fresh material. Was it nice not to have to be a sex-bomb romantic lead? It’s probably quite a relief…"

Hawes: "I suppose, being 48, I’m less the love interest. I’ve just played a retired assassin. I played a grandmother at 38. My husband barely plays a father."

Hornby: "He still gets to be a love interest!"

Hawes: "It’s the thing that has been missing from our screens – romance for the middle-aged. I’ve been banging on about this to anyone who’ll listen. Everyone asks me, 'What would you like to do?' Well, the success of Normal People and all those love stories between two people shows there’s obviously an audience for them, but Nobody Wants This proved that love is just as compelling when the couple are in their 40s. I think there is a huge appetite for more, it just takes one person to do it and to be a success. So, we’ll see…

"But that is part of what’s so special about this drama and Cassandra’s and Jane’s love story. It was lovely to play that, and the scenes with all those women – they were some of the funniest women…"

Hornby: "Yes, it was a spinster cluster production! It seemed a very happy set whenever I visited."

Hawes: "It’s written for a brilliant female cast – Rose Leslie [as family friend Isabella Fowle] and Jessica Hynes [as Jane and Cassandra’s sister-in-law Mary Austen] are hilarious – and a female producer bought the rights to it, we had a female director… It was just a joy, really – a genuinely amazing group of women.

"On most sets there’s still always a male presence because the crew is very male-heavy, but to have the core group be women on this drama is quite unusual. It was one of those sets where, chemically, we all just got along and I was very upset on the last day. And I’m usually like, 'Right, I’m off!' But I was very upset to be leaving all these women. I very nearly shed a tear, which is hard to believe!"

Hornby: "Do you know, while I was writing the book I was so happy in that little room, just with Jane and Cassandra, on my own. I went to see the last two episodes in the cutting room after they’d just finished, and the editor, the producer and the exec producer were all so upset because they didn’t want to leave such nice company.

"And that is so special to me – that you’ve all embraced these amazing sisters and their beautiful love story."

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