'Miss Austen' Recap: Episode 3

Miss Austen is available to stream. Recap the previous and following episode.
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Racked by fever, Cassandra desperately tells Isabella that she must hide Jane’s letters. Outside her room, Mary overhears before leaving the house to escape illness. Isabella sends Dinah to get ice for Cassandra, still ignoring Dinah’s pleas to call Mr. Lidderdale.

The surgeon sees Dinah running for ice, however, and calls upon Kintbury to see if anything is amiss. Isabella answers the door and tells him nothing is wrong. She asks him about her sister Beth, who has been helping him tend to the sick people in the village who suffer the same malady that now infects Cassandra. Lidderdale directly asks about Cassandra’s health, worrying she has taken ill from her time in the village – and Isabella tells him she is fine. She retires upstairs to continue reading Jane Austen’s Patience to a sleeping Cassandra, who continues to revisit her youth in her fever dreams.

Cassy has grown close to Henry Hobday but still refuses to admit any romantic interest in him, bristling when the rest of the Austen family tease her about him and praise him. In all seriousness, Jane tells Cassy that unmarried women without a name are poor and objects of pity. While that is the fate awaitingr Jane, it does not have to be Cassy’s future.

When Henry calls upon the Austens and asks to walk with Cassy, she agrees. He eventually pauses on the beach and tells her that he loves her, and has since the moment he met her. As he proposes, she thinks back to the vow she made to her late fiancé Tom in the church at Kintbury: she would marry no man but Tom, even if he died.

Cassy refuses Henry, returning to Jane in tears. Jane is flabbergasted, and begs Cassy to explain. She reveals the vow; she cannot break her word.

In the present day, Dinah and Isabella find Cassandra sitting in that same church where she made her vow years ago. The fever has broken. Cassandra tells Isabella that she has a gift for tending to the sick; Isabella had once hoped that would be her vocation, she says, but that time has passed.

Mary returns to the sickness-free household, but still keeps her distance when visiting Cassandra to ask her about the letters she mentioned in her fever. Mary’s distance prevents her from seeing into the slightly ajar drawer that contains some of Jane’s letters, and Cassandra tells her that she was delirious; she has not found Jane’s letters, she lies.

Remarking that Cassandra seems worn out by resting and being a burden upon her hosts, Mary takes her leave. Cassandra reads Jane’s letters to Eliza about Henry’s offer of marriage and cries as she learns of her sister’s frustration with Cassy’s refusal. Didn’t you know that I did it in part for you, Cassandra says to her dead sister – she didn’t want to leave Jane alone by marrying Henry.

Even when they were younger, Mary’s visits were never pleasant. To avoid one of Mary’s trips to her in-laws the Austens, Jane organized a stay for Cassy and herself at the estate of their friends the Bigg-Withers. Jane adores the Bigg-Withers estate, but the two Bigg-Withers daughters fear that their brother Harris may eventually take a wife who ejects them from it. Fortified by a bit of liquid courage, Jane tries to converse with the shy Harris and is called to join him – alone – after dinner. She consents to be his wife.

Cassy is worried that Jane is making a bad decision, and Jane admits that the marriage is not for love but security: now she and Cassy will have money and land, and they will be able to keep the Bigg-Withers sisters on their estate as well. Cassy will be free to marry Henry – but Cassy tells Jane it will not happen. She warns Jane that she will be expected to have children, and the realization of what she has done slowly dawns on Jane. She will have no time to write; this was a mistake.

The next morning, she withdraws her consent and leaves the Bigg-Withers estate with Cassy.

The next time that Mary comes to visit the Austen estate, Cassy and Jane stay. Cassy admits some sympathy for Mary, who always fades in front of her husband beside Jane’s brilliant wit, but Cassy also agrees that Mary has grown “bumptious.” Indeed, Mary’s visit is so that James can ask his parents for both his father’s rectorship, as was long planned, and their house – all upon Mary’s prodding.

Cassy overhears this request, but refrains from telling Jane, who is finishing up her first book, Lady Susan. Cassy tells Jane the book is perfect, so Jane sends it off to a publisher.

In the interim, however, the Austens must pack up their home to vacate it for James and Mary. Mrs. Austen cries as they bundle themselves into a carriage.

Isabella is also in the midst of packing her childhood home so it can be taken by another family, that of the rector who will replace her late father. Healthy once again, Cassandra is helping with the packing – and finds copies of Jane’s books hidden behind other books in the library.

Mary is also nominally helping, although she’s really looking for Jane’s letters. She brings along her stepdaughter Anna to help, to the delight of Cassandra and Isabella. When Isabella asks Cassandra about Jane, whose Persuasion she loves, Mary interrupts to say that Jane was not always kind – at least not to her. But Anna says she was a most excellent aunt.

Cassandra is determined to find Isabella a new place that she can call home. She worries that Isabella will suffer otherwise just as Jane did after she lost her childhood home.

The Austens took rooms on an upper floor in Bath. Jane – who prefers country estates to noisy cities – sunk into melancholy that was only lifted by the acceptance by the publisher of her novel. She immediately begins working on another. But another travail is in store: her father is ailing. He tells Cassy that she must take care of Jane.

And Cassandra will also take care of Isabella. She visits Isabella’s sister Beth, whose school has reopened now that illness has receded from the village. She asks that Beth consider taking in Isabella, even if Beth marries Mr. Lidderdale. Beth laughs. In the matter of romantic feelings for Lidderdale, Cassandra has the wrong sister.