We are aware that there is a constituency of Janeites (and outside observers with agendas of their own) who read our rants about the various films being produced and say, “Oh, there goes old Negative Mags again.” We are continually frustrated by our inability to properly express our opinion on the matter.

We suggest that those wondering about our oft-expressed suspicion towards BECOMING JANE might read this post at Sorrow at Sills Bend.

The more forgiveable, because somehow natural, mistake is thinking or assuming that those novels, so accurate and perceptive about social systems, so psychologically powerful, and so full of personal brilliance and magnetism, must contain clues about the inner life of the person who wrote them. It is like with Shakespeare. The historical record doesn’t satisfy our curiosity so we look for biographical imprints in the works, and about things in the works that seem real & urgent to us - the romance plots in Austen’s novels - we think “you couldn’t write this well unless from personal experience”.

The other misapprehension is not so blameless. It involves suppressing & ignoring all the tons and tons of evidence about the hard-earned professionalism, the deliberateness, of Austen’s writing career, in favour of seeing it as some sort of freak of nature. This thing about an LCR implies that before it, she was not a writer, but after it, she was: without it she might never have picked up a pen.

Anyone who spends any length of time looking over all her writings, or with one of the many good biographies around, will see that Austen was an accomplished writer well before she was out of her teens, that she was extremely literate and had a sophisticated understanding of the conventions of the courtship novel genre, and that she was determined to be a professional writer, for financial reasons as well as artistic ones. To pretend all this doesn’t matter, or that it matters less than Austen’s private erotic life, is a horrible devaluation of what this woman writer’s career means.

Hear, hear! Go read the rest of this thoughtfully expressed and very well-written post, minus the snark and rantings one might read here.

It’s not that we are against the movies. We love the intersection of Jane Austen’s life and work with pop culture–that’s why we started this blog, after all, to catalog it. We are delighted with the idea of movies about Jane Austen and adapting her works, and we are aware that there are many Janeites who are perfectly satisfied with the recent productions. We just wish that the filmmakers tried harder to satisfy both the Jane Austen fans and those who could not care less about her, but only go to the films to see the flavor-of-the-month starring in it.

We don’t expect to change everyone’s mind. We hope only to encourage critical thinking and commentary.

ETA corrections rendered impossible last night by computer malfunctions!

We stumbled across something in our travels tonight that boggled the imagination. Speaking of made up stories!

Well, the games have begun…and you can’t blame us for this one!

A commenter in the BECOMING JANE photos thread below posted a link to an article in the Daily Mail from a couple of weeks ago that we missed. First, the interesting part:

The pair, according to the film, are driven apart by their mothers, played by Dame Maggie and Walters, who disapprove because neither lover comes from a wealthy family.

Mothers? We sincerely doubt that Tom Lefroy’s mother will show up in this one. We think they mean Anne “Madam” Lefroy, who was his cousin, or possibly his aunt, we have to look it up and our books are not to hand. So this information is not especially dependable, but it could mean that our initial suspicion was correct and that Maggie Smith will play Mrs. Austen and Julie Walters will play Madam Lefroy.

Now, for the fun and games! Let the spork-fisking begin (as our line-by-line snarks have been delightfully labeled elsewhere).

JANE AUSTEN will be given the Hollywood treatment in two weeks when shooting begins on Becoming Jane — starring Anne Hathaway, James McAvoy, Dame Maggie Smith and Julie Walters. But the £9 million production has already been mocked by Austen experts, for whom the plot is not a truth universally acknowledged.

Mock? Who, us? *polishes halo*

The film portrays the author as a romantic who is inspired to write her greatest works by a thwarted love affair with Tom Lefroy, a real-life suitor with whom she flirted when she was 19. Helen Lefroy, Tom’s descendant and vice-chairman of The Jane Austen Society of the United Kingdom, has dismissed the “fanciful” idea that Tom and Jane shared a passion that was stifled only by their mothers’ disapproval.

So don’t blame us for this one. Not that we’re not enjoying it or anything.

Hathaway, who recently appeared in Brokeback Mountain, will play the author as desperately in love with Tom, a dashing Mr Darcy figure

D’OH!

played by McAvoy, exchanging smouldering looks on country walks and on the dancefloors of Hampshire mansions.

Douglas Rae, of Ecosse films, said that the passion would be as intimate as possible within the constraints of late 18thcentury customs. “There is a lot of passion in the film, but it is passion across the ballrooms and the soirées and walks with other people,” he said.

Well, that’s good to hear. Though we were hoping for at least one hot snog. If you’re gonna go fantasy, go all the way.

The pair, according to the film, are driven apart by their mothers, played by Dame Maggie and Walters, who disapprove because neither lover comes from a wealthy family.

And Mrs. Austen interfering in her daughter’s love affairs is like P&P how again? Imagine Mrs. Bennet turning away anything that comes in the shape of a lover to one of her daughters!

But Mrs Lefroy, 85, told The Times that this had little basis in fact. Tom, who was about to start practising law at Lincoln’s Inn, would have found Austen too independent in spirit, she said. “What people don’t wish to note is that after he met Jane he became engaged to the sister of his college friend, Anthony Paul. There are letters in Ireland that show she (the sister, Mary) was a fairly simple girl. I think he liked Mary because she was biddable. People of his ability didn’t want intellectuals. He wanted a housekeeper.”

That’s very interesting. We wish more people would keep in mind that both of them seem to have moved on to other relationships after this flirtation.

Romantic Austen enthusiasts point to correspondence from Jane to her sister Cassandra on January 15, 1796, which states: “At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over. My tears flow at the melancholy idea.” But the previous day she had written that she did not “care sixpence” about Tom. It is not clear in which letter she was being sarcastic.

Both, actually. All the letters about Tom have a rather lighthearted and silly quality to them.

Mrs Lefroy, who is Tom’s first cousin four times removed, believes that Austen merely mined Tom for information for her writing. “I do think she realised that her destiny was to write. If she had married and had children she would not have had enough time…

Hear, hear!!!!

… And she was so very emotionally tied up with Cassandra that she would not have wanted to leave her.”

Umm…not willing to go so far. No. Why couldn’t Cassandra have come to live with Jane and Mr. Jane? That was why she accepted Harris Bigg-Wither’s proposal, after all, so that her sister and mother would have been guaranteed a home. Fortunately, her brothers were able to provide it, as well as the independence Jane needed to write. They didn’t make the Austen ladies rich, by any means, but they weren’t starving in the hedgerows either. (We keep telling our siblings that we want them to pay our bills and keep house for us so we could write–and blog–full-time but they just look at us funny.)

And one more thing: about the comparisons to SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE. The big difference there is that SiL was delivered with a great big wink. Nobody pretended it was anything other than a fantasy. If they show Jane Austen drinking out of a coffee mug with “Souvenir of Steventon, Hampshire” on the side of it, then the two films can be compared. (And we think that would be totally cool, incidentally.) If they deliver it as a straight bioflick, the comparisons to BRAVEHEART and ELIZABETH are more apt, we think. Don’t forget: MADE UP STORY!