Becoming Jane

Synopsis: Based on an book of the same name, the film explores Jane Austen’s emergence from adolescence into writer, woman, lover.

Becoming Jane is a little like "Pride and Prejudice" through the looking glass. Inspired by an academic biography of the same name, it suggests that Austen’s novels give clues to at least some pivotal events in her real life that consequently shaped her fiction. The film does not look or feel all that dissimilar from the various Austen period dramas that have come before it, but the twist that the real life dimension serves up to the story of a great romance gives it a note of distinction.

Anne Hathaway’s Jane Austen is a likeable heroine, with a perfect Emma Thompsonish accent. She lives with her sister and brothers in somewhat impecunious obscurity with their father (the local priest) and mother (James Cromwell and Julie Walters). The dashing figure of Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy) breaks into the local social life and more slowly into Jane’s affections.

Cast as something of the Darcy that would later woo Eliza Bennett, Lefroy follows a similar path of disdain followed by admiration and passion. Like Darcy, Lefroy is beset by an overbearing patron (Ian Richardson). Yet it is the elderly relation (Maggie Smith) of another of Jane’s suitors who brings to mind the character of Darcy’s aunt, as well as providing some of the film’s classic scenes. There are also references to other works, such as Jane’s glamorous friend Eliza de Feuillide who perhaps inspired Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park.

Despite these biographical reversals of fiction into ‘fact’, Becoming Jane is a convincing history of a vivacious, slightly audacious young woman determined to be true to herself. Jane’s vibrant imagination would take the events and turns of phrase around her as inspiration for some of the great novels of the English language. The film may not be a work of art of similar standing, but it still manages to entertain and uplift.

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