'The cherry on top of the cake was you!' Bazaar sits down with Keeley Hawes and Rose Leslie
As Bazaar sits down to film the latest episode of One on One with Keeley Hawes and Rose Leslie, it’s an effort to stop the two actresses from nattering with one another.
The pair, who have been reunited at the Charlotte Street Hotel in central London to promote their period drama Miss Austen, are clearly such firm friends that it translates easily both on and off screen. In fact, Leslie teases that her interest in joining the BBC series was down to Hawes’ attachment to the project from the offset.
“The cherry on top of the cake was you!” she tells her co-star, laughing. “I already knew that I wanted to be part of this project because you were in it. It was a no-brainer.”
Miss Austen, an adaptation of Gill Hornby’s best-selling novel of the same name, explores the mystery as to why Jane Austen’s sister Cassandra burned a significant cache of the writer’s letters after her death. Exploring their lives through a series of flashbacks. Hawes excels as the devoted Cassy, while Leslie plays Isabella – an unmarried woman grieving the death of her father.
In addition to Hawes being attached, Leslie admits she has always had a deep-seated love for Austen and her work. “I read the scripts and the writing was superb,” she says. “I have always been a fan – since the 1996 version of Pride and Prejudice. That’s where it all kicked off for me.”
As we celebrate 250 years of Jane Austen this year, we can expect to see a slew of more dramas and adaptations celebrating the novelist and her work. For Hawes, Jane’s books remain popular in the zeitgeist because of the universality of the content. “It’s always extraordinary and surprising to me that Austen only wrote six novels,” she explains. “She feels like Dickens. The themes are still relatable, about relationships, love and life. They are stories that mean something. They’ve very human.
“I had a great conversation with Gill Hornby – she was talking about how the way we read Austen’s work these days is so different to how they were interpreted at the time. While they are about love, for women in that time, it really carried jeopardy. It could literally be life or death. There was real consequence to it all.”
Miss Austen - Gill Hornby
It’s also partly why period dramas are still so popular among viewers, Leslie argues. “There’s escapism in it,” she says. “It’s a slower pace of life. I’m [speaking of] a certain aspect of society, the households that had the luxury of servants. There’s almost a comfort blanket [feeling].”
And so to the final, burning (pardon the pun) question: why did Cassandra choose to burn Jane’s letters? It's something that even the most devoted Janeites have described as an ‘act of historical vandalism’.
Hawes is understandably more sympathetic to Cassy’s actions. “I think it was just that she didn’t want other people to know Jane’s thoughts and feelings, because all of those people were still around.
“[Cassy] was brutal; there are letters I’ve seen online where the bottom has been lopped off. It was a good clean edit of what she wanted people to see. Cassy was brave, bold and noble. I’m glad that she did it. It makes Jane’s legacy about her brilliant work and not about her personal life.”
Miss Austen airs on Sunday nights on BBC One, or is able to watch in full on BBC iPlayer
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