Latest news with #CassandraAusten
BBC News
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Jane Austen home in Winchester opens to public for first time
The house where Jane Austen lived for the final weeks of her life has been opened to the public for the first novelist lived in a home on College Street, Winchester, until her death on the 18 July 1817. Winchester College has opened the house to the public as part of the global celebrations to mark 250 years since Austen was can visit the building on Wednesdays and Saturdays from 4 June until 30 August and displays and artefacts will show how she spent her last days in the city. Dr Richard Foster, the keeper of collections at Winchester College, described it as "very exciting"."Jane Austen is an author who means so much to lots of people and so i think people will be very excited to be in this space where she lived and where she died," he Foster said Austen is believed to have moved to the house for the last eight weeks of her life, when she travelled to Winchester to see a and her sister Cassandra rented rooms in the building, he said. He believes the house has not changed a great deal since her death in the 19th Century and the rooms remain in a similar style to how Austen would have known them."It's a rare chance to see and experience one of the places where she lived and where she wrote her last letters and her last poem," he said. You can follow BBC Hampshire & Isle of Wight on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram.
Times
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius review — fans will lap up the quality insights
It is a truth universally acknowledged that any article on Jane Austen must begin with the words 'It is a truth universally acknowledged…' I thought the same was going to apply to Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius (BBC1) when it started a with a close-up of Emoke Zsigmond, the actress playing Austen, scratching out the word 'truth' with her quill. Here we go again, I thought. But it didn't show us the rest of the sentence. Maybe she was writing another of Austen's famous sentences: 'Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure.' There is a lot of supposition — 'she must have felt'; 'she would have been' — in this story of Austen's life marking 250 years since the year of her birth. Which is unavoidable because, as anyone who watched the excellent Miss Austen starring Keeley Hawes knows, her sister Cassandra burnt most of her letters, considering the contents too wicked, funny, waspish, outrageous and offensive for public consumption. She thought it might hurt the subjects' feelings, and she was probably right. • Read more TV reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews It's a huge loss to historians and Austen fans but, let's be honest, would you want all your snippy, gossipy texts and messages that you sent to friends and family over the years to be released after your death? In one letter that survived she wrote that a woman they knew who had suffered a miscarriage had deliberately aborted because her husband was so ugly. Oof. This is a perky, informative three-parter, even if I'm not keen on those dramatised reconstructions in which the actors don't speak. Given Austen's mastery of words it feels ironic that she is muted, but then this is the style of the Rise of a Genius brand. They did the same with Shakespeare. We hear that Austen 'might' have been put off having babies by helping her cousins in labour and the fact that two of her relatives had died in childbirth, though it seems more likely she was a free-spirited intellect who didn't want to be a wife and baby machine and fiercely fought for her own financial independence. It seems a safe bet that she would indeed have been devastated, as the series says, when her father sold off his library to fund his retirement, because it had been her window to the world. But not half as much as when he left everything to his eldest son. 'The whole world is a conspiracy to enrich one part of our family at the expense of another,' she wrote about the unfairness of primogeniture. The best parts here are the contributions of the talking heads, from Helen Fielding, the Bridget Jones creator, Tamsin Greig, Greg Wise and Samuel West to experts and historians such as Paula Byrne and Louise Curran. The actors occasionally speak Austen's sparkling words aloud, which slightly made up for her muteness in the dramatised sequences. The writer Colm Toibin said of her protectiveness of Mansfield Park, a novel she felt didn't get the critical attention it deserved, that it was like the 'orphan child' that many writers have — the progeny they feel is underappreciated. The series maintains quality to the end, showing us Austen's death at the age of 41, her head cradled lovingly by her sister for six hours at a crooked angle. Wise speaks, movingly, of being at his own sister's deathbed. 'It is exquisitely powerful and very tender,' he says. Cassandra's own words about her lost sister were beautiful: 'She was the sun of my life … the gilder of every pleasure … the soother of every sorrow.' If you have the time, this is a nourishing three hours on which, I imagine, Austen fans will binge.★★★★☆ Love TV? Discover the best shows on Netflix, the best Prime Video TV shows, the best Disney+ shows , the best Apple TV+ shows, the best shows on BBC iPlayer , the best shows on Sky and Now, the best shows on ITVX, the best shows on Channel 4 streaming, the best shows on Paramount+ and our favourite hidden gem TV shows. Don't forget to check our critics' choices to what to watch this week and browse our comprehensive TV guide
Washington Post
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
‘Jane Austen Wrecked My Life': Modern love with a Regency twist
Repressed passions, thwarted ambitions and Empire-waisted gowns aren't just Regency-era relics in 'Jane Austen Wrecked My Life,' a low-tonnage pleasure bomb aimed straight at anyone who finds themselves at sixes and sevens with the conclusion of 'Miss Austen.' That recently aired 'Masterpiece Theatre' series centered on Jane Austen's sister, Cassandra, who famously burned some of the famous author's letters, leading to centuries of mystery and conjecture. 'Jane Austen Wrecked My Life,' written and directed by Laura Piani, isn't nearly so fraught or historically freighted. Set in the present day, this genteel bonbon stars Camille Rutherford as Agathe, a would-be writer working as a clerk in Paris's storied Shakespeare and Co. bookstore; the film opens with Rutherford performing a sinuous dance through the shop, caressing books to the R&B ballad 'Cry to Me.'
