Given the many movies and TV series based on Jane Austen’s books, it was inevitable that the field would begin to widen and we’d have movies about people reading Austen (The Jane Austen Book Club, excellent) and about Jane herself. Next it will be movies about people who watch movies based on books by Austen.
Becoming Jane is a sweet little movie that gives Jane the opportunity to act like a character in one of her novels, and gives Anne Hathaway (as Jane) the opportunity to out-Keira Keira Knightly in Pride and Prejudice. This she does with aplomb, and the mandatory love interest is supplied by an equally good James MacAvoy, deploying the charm he didn’t quite get to develop in later, though equally good, roles in The Last King of Scotland and Atonement.
It’s plausible that Jane Austen had an early romance, though we know she didn’t marry, and it makes a good story. What is not even slightly plausible is the scene of Austen doing a public reading from one of her novels. None of her books was published under her name during her lifetime; she was so secretive about her writing, in fact, that she took pains to hide any evidence of it even from close friends. So that’s a bit of a lapse in historical accuracy, though I doubt it will mar the movie for the kind of audience it aims at.
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