Muzzamil Hussain was in 3rd-grade school when the first bombs fell on the playground outside of his classroom in Kargil, a mountain city in India. While the violent onset of the 1998 Kargil war between Pakistan and India unfolded around him, Hussain and his family escaped south to the remote Suru Valley.
After India claimed victory later that year and displaced families returned home, Hussain listened as his bedridden grandfather asked the family to visit an old property, initially built by Hussain's great-grandfather, near Kargil's bazaar to make sure it had survived the war. When Hussain's uncles cracked through an old rusty latch and peered through the hand-carved wooden doors, they discovered wooden crates stamped with names of cities worldwide. Making space on the dusty floor, the family began to lay out silks from China, silver cookware from Afghanistan, rugs from Persia, turquoise from Tibet, saddles from Mongolia, and luxury soaps and salves from London, New York, and Munich. 

This mysterious act of destruction is investigated in Miss Austen, a new four-part television drama based on Gill Hornby's best-selling and critically acclaimed novel. Years after Jane's death, Cassandra (Keeley Hawes) traveled to the village of Kintbury in Berkshire, where the Austen family's friends, the Fowles, lived. Cassandra is, ostensibly, there to help Isabella Fowle (Rose Leslie), whose father, Fulwar, is dying. However, this house holds many bitter-sweet memories for her (in real life, this is where she had been staying when Jane wrote about Tom Lefroy), and she has an ulterior motive. She wants to retrieve letters written by the late Jane to their friend Eliza Fowle, Isabella's mother, which she fears might contain details damaging the novelist's legacy. When she finds the correspondence, it revives powerful memories of the events of years ago. The series takes place in two timelines – in 1830 –  with the unmarried Isabella facing eviction from her home after her father's death and Cassandra trying to protect her sister's legacy – and decades previously, with young Cassandra (Synnøve Karlsen) and Jane (Patsy Ferran) navigating romances, family problems, and the ups and downs of life.