7 Onscreen Jane Austen Performances, Ranked — How Will ‘Miss Austen’ Fare?

For all the screen adaptations of Jane Austen’s works — e.g. Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility — and movies and TV shows about her writing — e.g. The Jane Austen Book Club, Austenland — there are surprisingly few onscreen stories about the writer herself. But we’ll get one more on Sunday, May 4, when the four-part series Miss Austen debuts on PBS’ Masterpiece at 9/8c.

Black Mirror’s Patsy Ferran plays Jane in the miniseries, but the central character is actually Jane’s sister Cassandra, played by Bodyguard’s Keeley Hawes (wife of onetime Mr. Darcy player Matthew Macfadyen), who “makes a decision that will have consequences for centuries to come” to preserve Jane’s memory, PBS says.