Trying to grow a thicker skin
It looks like we’re going to need it as the UK release date of BECOMING JANE approaches. The studio is brazenly going forward with its campaign of insisting that Pride and Prejudice was copied almost whole from Jane Austen’s own life experiences, a contention with which, as regular AustenBlog readers know, we disagree heartily.
Alert Janeite Amo tipped us off that the Times would have an article about the film in its Sunday edition, and we were able to locate the article, annoyingly titled “Mr. Darcy, I presume?” It’s not as bad as that, however. The article was written by Jon Spence, whose book Becoming Jane Austen started all this off.
Moral of the story: just because something is made up doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
Dude, you so don’t want to go there.
Lefroy seems to have shared something of Austen’s own odd blend of shyness and boldness. He was serious, intelligent, hard-working and ambitious. But a portrait of him done at about this time gives no hint of a stuffy, scholarly drudge. He had another side to his character, indicated by his declaration that Tom Jones was his favourite novel. It was a few decades later that the Victorians deemed that a “lady” could not read Fielding’s novel until she was married, but Tom Jones was always considered racy. Austen had read it and remembered it so vividly, she was able to make the joke (more than once) that Lefroy affected a white morning coat because “his hero”, Tom Jones, wears one.
Can’t the guy like a book or even admire a fictional character without wanting to be that character? And we point out that both Jane and Cassandra Austen had read Tom Jones–otherwise Cassandra would not have understood Jane’s references in her letters.
We don’t mean to nitpick too closely. Most of this article is just fine. But here Mr. Spence, we think, strays a bit too far into speculation.
As a first tentative step, perhaps, towards getting the old man’s approval, it was arranged for him to meet Austen and two of her brothers when they passed through London on their way to Kent in August 1796.
We do not believe that there is any evidence of that reason for the trip to London at that time (which did take place). We also believe that there is no evidence one way or the other that Jane Austen met with Tom Lefroy there.
The film suggests that Mr Darcy was based on Lefroy. I am inclined to think, though, that it is Eliza-beth Bennet, described by Austen as “as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print”, whom Lefroy inspired. And that Austen gave something of her own character, the person some strangers “accused of haughtiness”, to Darcy.
But Darcy really WAS proud. He really WAS a snob. He refused to dance at the Meryton assembly with persons he considered beneath him (”at such an assembly as this”), which was very rude behavior in those times. Darcy, like Elizabeth, has a journey in this novel. She must get past her prejudices about him, and he must give up some of his pride over her relatives. At the end of the novel, he even admits as much:
I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle. As a child I was taught what was right, but I was not taught to correct my temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit. Unfortunately an only son (for many years an only child), I was spoilt by my parents, who, though good themselves (my father, particularly, all that was benevolent and amiable), allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing; to care for none beyond my own family circle; to think meanly of all the rest of the world; to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own. Such I was, from eight to eight and twenty; and such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth! What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled.
The Meryton neighborhood didn’t need to make assumptions about Darcy’s pride. He admits to it readily, once he’s been taught better.
What we do know is that when Austen returned to Hampshire in October 1796, she was creatively on fire. She began writing the first version of Pride and Prejudice immediately, and completed it in less than a year. She rewrote Elinor and Marianne as Sense and Sensibility, and moved on to the first version of Northanger Abbey — all in little more than two years.
And in about three years between 1812 and 1815, Jane wrote Mansfield Park and Emma–novels of sophistication and subtlety that she did not achieve with her earlier work. Then she went on, in another year, to write Persuasion, while ill with the disease that would soon cause her death. The woman was a genius, and needed no Tom Lefroy to encourage that genius, thank you very much. *snaps fingers*
Thanks to the imaginative intuition of the film writers, we now know that Lefroy named his first daughter Jane, but Austen never called a hero Tom — the name is conspicuous by its absence.
*coughTomBertramcough*
Who, by the way, is hardly heroic, though rather an amusing fellow.
Is it really too much to believe that Jane Austen set out purposely to construct, from her imagination, two characters who appear as opposites, who will never get along, who could never make a successful marriage, but who set out to learn better of themselves and each other, and at last come together as complementary personalities rather than antagonists? Did she HAVE to live it to write it? We have no doubt that Jane cared for Tom–how much is in dispute but we are quite willing to believe that her feelings towards Tom were quite deep–but we think the main thing she carried away from the relationship, as Mr. Spence suggested (and biographers suggested back to J.E. Austen-Leigh), was knowing the way her heroines felt when they learned to care for their hero. There is no evidence that Jane pined overmuch or that she felt some compulsive need to pour her tortured soul into every novel. She apparently had other relationships, most notably with the Mysterious Suitor-by-the-Sea, but there are dances and flirtations mentioned casually here and there in her letters. Just because Jane did not feel a desperate need to marry the first eligible guy who came along and offered (who would be Harris Bigg-Wither) doesn’t mean she was pining for her lost love. It quite possibly just meant that she did not feel a need or desire to marry Harris Bigg-Wither.
We submit that if filmmakers wanted to make a romantic film about Jane Austen, her romances and her writing, they were barking up the wrong tree to choose Tom Lefroy. The timing of the incident of the Mysterious Suitor-by-the-Sea, l’affaire Bigg-Wither, and the first professional sale of her writing (Susan, later published as Northanger Abbey) would be a more profitable avenue of inquiry in our opinion. And now we shall climb down from our soapbox.
The Independent has another article that is not overly horrible but perhaps a trifle sloppy in its syntax.
The passion her heroines used to enjoy was now seen as dangerous by Austen. Rejecting the dashing Henry Crawford, who might have been the hero of one of the earlier novels, Fanny Price marries instead Edmund, the humourless first cousin whom she regards as a brother.
We nearly got whiplash from that transition. It sounds rather like Jane rejected Henry Crawford. And there’s no way he would ever be a hero of any of her novels.
And for our Gentle Readers who have so enjoyed the golden words of Miss Anne Hathaway, we have a lovely tidbit from the Guardian.
‘Did she have sex? We will never know exactly what they did behind closed doors.’
- Actress Anne Hathaway, fresh from The Devil Wears Prada, prepares for a Jane Austen biopic. There was a time when we were happy with the pleasure of the text. Now we’re set to get Jane in her smalls.
Annie, dear, we’re begging here: shut up. Just shut up. Please, for the love of all that is holy and Janelike, just shut up NOW.
Dorothy’s waiting impatiently with our bedtime cup of vanilla rooibos and the warming pan, so good night, Gentle Readers.
