Columbia Pictures has announced a new project, titled BECOMING JANE.

Becoming Jane: According to The Hollywood Reporter, Columbia Pictures is brushing up on its Jane Austen with Becoming Jane, a biographical feature about the British author.

Developed by London-based period-piece specialists Ecosse Films, “Jane” will be produced by Graham Broadbent, co-founder and former partner at Mission Pictures.

Penned by Kevin Hood, the film is described as a biographical portrait of the British writer at around age 20, before she became famous, and involves a love theme with Austen falling for a young Irish lawyer. With the studio signing a development deal on the project, “Jane” is out to directors, with the studio looking to put the film into production next year.

Born in 1775, Austen is best known for her books “Pride and Prejudice,” “Mansfield Park,” “Emma” and “Persuasion.” With a strong bent toward historical matter, London-based Ecosse’s credits include “Charlotte Gray,” which the company co-financed with Warner Bros. Pictures, and “Mrs. Brown.”

It is unclear if the film is based on the Jon Spence biography Becoming Jane Austen, which also dwells upon Jane’s romance with Tom Lefroy.

Keira Knightley says she will be taking etiquette lessons to prepare for her role as Elizabeth Bennet in the upcoming big-screen production of Pride and Prejudice.

In a couple of days she’s flying back to England to begin work on “Pride and Prejudice.” Though she’s proved herself a quick study in her other projects, Knightley, for once, sounds slightly intimidated by her new project, which is set in the 1790s.

“I’m entering the world of Jane Austen, and there’s going to be etiquette lessons. It’s going to be terrifying,” she says. “Apparently rehearsals will be around the dinner table, with historians telling us how to sit and how to eat and how to do it all, so that will be interesting — especially for me, who isn’t exactly the most ladylike being.”

Sounds almost like something the Bingley sisters might say about Lizzy.

Also very interesting news, if it is true, that they are setting the film in the 1790s. First Impressions, the name of the unpublished, now-lost manuscript that Jane revised and published in 1813 as Pride and Prejudice, was written in the 1790s, and P&P retains some details that are more in keeping with that decade than the 1810s: the militia billeting in towns and camping at Brighton, for instance.