Becoming Jane...

[fajrdrako]

Another Jane Austen movie. Not a story by her this time, but a story about her: the story of her brief (and probably mostly apocryphal) romance with Tom Lefroy.

I enjoyed it in spite of myself. It's a good historical movie, well extrapolated from fact, well acted - especially by the beautiful Anne Hathaway as Jane Austen. I wanted to find fault and really couldn't. The sets, the costuming, the acting - all first-class. I found myself comparing it in my mind to the Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice, which to my mind was so unlike the period. I was almost more interested in the the romance of Jane's brother Joe (played stylishly by Joe Anderson) with a wealthy widow, than I was in Jane's relationship with Lefroy.

I also found myself wishing for the umpteenth time that they'd make regency movies that weren't about Jane Austen or her novels. Movies about people of the period whom I find fascinating, like Byron and Shelley and Mary Shelley, or Napoleon and his connections, or more Hornblower and Sharpe; and especially I'd like to see movie versions of Georgette Heyer and the Regency romance genre. They could. They should. They don't.

Becoming Jane made me cry, though. I particularly liked the scene where Jane met Mrs. Radcliffe. I also liked the scenes where we saw Lefroy without Jane - when he was in court, for example.

Does this movie have Jane Austen herself rolling in her grave, or at least rolling her eyes in polite disgust? I'm not sure what she would have thought about being cast as a heroine of romance, even if it is gently doomed romance enlivened with its share of ironical wit.

I was reading an article in Macleans magazine from August 13 that articulated so well why I don't generally like Jane Austen's books, even if there are many things I like about them - very mixed feelings. Persuasion is my favourite and I think it has somewhat different attitudes from the others. But this article by Lianne George, called "The Opposite of Sex", saying:

She's a pragmatist, an economist... In the 19th century, Charlotte Brontë famously rejected Austen's work as lacking warmth, enthusiasm, or anything heartfelt: "...The passions are perfectly unknown to her." ...Her works conjure- rightly or not - some quaint, if unrealistic notion of dignity and restraint.

It is precisely because Austen is not a romantic that her stories resonate today.

They don't resonate for me. I remain a romantic, ujnable to appreciate Austen's cynicism. I'm firmly in the Charlotte Brontë mould, with a deep distrust of Austen's distrust of passion. Austen is witty, but cold.

She isn't cold in Becoming Jane. The movie restores passion to the story of her life, and I'm not sure if that's true to her biography or fair to her legacy.