Oh, those damnable Austen purists
We are such a bunch of spoilsports! These lovely people who are making Becoming Jane just want to give poor, plain, spinsterly Jane Austen some pretty lipstick and a little snogging and romping with prostitutes and we sit here all full of our historical rectitude and ruin everyone’s fun! We are such a bunch of meanies.
Alert Janeite Vanessa told us about a long article in the Telegraph Magazine about Becoming Jane, which she described as “scary.” Oh, yes. Bring out the sporks, Gentle Readers.
First of all, the photo. STAND UP STRAIGHT, young lady! Sheesh! It looks like that big knot of hair is weighing her head down or something. If we have to sit through another period adaptation with a slumping, glumping-about heroine for the sake of “modernity” we shall not be responsible for our actions.
And the link to the photo gallery didn’t work for us. Try this one. We’ve seen most of them but there’s a few new ones.
‘I didn’t realise that Jane Austen had been in love,’ Broadbent says, voicing the astonishment that will no doubt echo from Austen fans around the country.
No, not really.
‘I just love the idea that she had this romantic experience. We never imagine that. We just think of her as a spinstery old lady.’
YOU do, perhaps.
Jane’s piano-lid slamming, it transpires, is not only down to a case of writer’s block, but also a protest against her destiny. Unless something happens, she will marry Lady Gresham’s nephew Mr Wisley (Lawrence Fox), live comfortably and suffer the long, slow death of her soul (and her writing ambition). ‘I cannot marry without affection,’ she cries, but knows her freedom is compromised by being a woman with no money.
The required something is Lefroy, of course, who leads her astray with a copy of The History of Tom Jones (’Your horizons must be widened,’ he whispers) and a risque evening trip to Brampton Fair (hence the prostitutes et al).
We think it safe to say that Jane was familiar with Tom Jones before she ever met Tom Lefroy. As was Cassandra Austen, since Jane alluded to the novel in a letter to her sister.
Heartbreak is forced on Jane, but she is left with something no one can take away – experience. And she uses it for other ends. Her adventure is no longer Lefroy, but the novel upstairs. The film cuts to her candlelit bedroom. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged,’ she writes, ‘that a single man in possession of a good fortune…’ An icon is born.
Oh dear Jane. Kill us now. Please. We’re begging here.
The film leaves us in no doubt as to the role Tom Lefroy played in Jane Austen’s career. ‘He awakened her to the power of love,’ Robert Bernstein, the co-producer, says. ‘Anybody has to learn about love in order to write about it.’
And yet she had managed to struggle through Elinor and Marianne before ever meeting Tom Lefroy. A mere coincidence, we are sure.
Becoming Jane certainly looks different from most other Austen productions. It is still a period picture, with magnificent country houses and carriages, and a Wordsworthian rapture for fields, but the air is cold and wet, the colours are earthy – mustard, yellow ochre, burnt sienna – and there is a wintry feel draped over proceedings.
Back there again, are we? How is this different from Persuasion95–or even P&P05?
And he doesn’t stop with Austen. The whole film feels highly charged. The first we see of Jane’s sister Cassandra (Anna Maxwell Martin) and her fiance, Robert Fowle (Tom Vaughan Lawlor), they are in flimsy nightwear.
Um? Well, it looks like Cassandra’s not yet married after all, but her fiancé was named TOM Fowle. (Nightwear? They tease us, we are certain!)
The flirtation between Eliza de Feuille (Lucy Cohu), a rich widow, and Jane’s younger brother, the dandyish Henry (Joe Anderson), is so ripe you get the feeling that all they want to do is strip off and gambol by the river. (And this only a year after Eliza’s husband, a French count, had had his head chopped off.) ‘Eliza has experienced a lot in her life, knows what she wants and she kind of reels Henry in,’ says Cohu, last seen as Princess Margaret in The Queen’s Sister.
Actually Henry had to work very hard to persuade Eliza to marry him. She liked being a widow too much–a married woman’s freedom, with no husband to cramp her style.
Even the swifts are at it. ‘The female utters a loud piercing cry of ecstasy,’ Lefroy reads to a flustered Jane. And is that really Mr Austen diving under the bedcovers to Mrs Austen’s giggles? ‘He’s tickling her!’ Rae laughs. ‘Or at least, that’s what I told my daughter.’ But the film is not titillating or gratuitous, he says. ‘It’s very chaste! There is only one kiss!’
There you go to all those worried about nudity etc.
The eagerness to bring Austen up to date does sometimes slap you in the face. When Henry suggests he and Tom go on a ‘Tahitian love-fest’, he sounds less like a rake from the 18th century than a Hooray at Annabel’s. ‘That was a real thing that happened in 1796,’ insists Kevin Hood, the co-scriptwriter. ‘Brothels at the turn of the century were pretty wild places.’
We’re sure they were, but are less sure that Henry Austen would have indulged in them, or taken a prospective brother-in-law (and very young nephew of a neighbor) to one.
Just when we’re about to call for our bottle of Tullamore Dew (kept at AustenBlog World Headquarters for medicinal purposes only, of course) to give us strength to wade through the rest of this glop, a heroine comes riding to our rescue.
The vexed question, of course, is whether any of it is true. ‘It’s nonsense,’ argues Deirdre Le Faye, the editor of Austen’s letters (now in its third edition), proof of her lifelong loyalty to the cause. ‘You might as well say Lady Hamilton was a vestal virgin living in a convent.’
When we read this, we pumped our fist in the air and cried, “YES!” Go Deirdre!!!
But Le Faye maintains it was all short-lived. ‘She’d obviously been flirting with him. And it does rather sound like for a time, Jane was regretting his absence, but that is all there is to it.’
Jane never saw Lefroy again after his Christmas visit. And as for Lefroy inspiring her to write: ‘It’s like saying Shakespeare murdered people to give him enough information to write Macbeth. Poppycock. She was a highly intelligent girl. She’d have been a good writer in any circumstances.’
*The Editrix and Dorothy wave scarves in the air*
Of course, the intriguing thing about Austen is how little we know. (The biography in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen, edited by Janet Todd, runs to only 10 pages.) Filtered through the minds of academics, she comes out differently each time.
Ain’t that the truth!
Jon Spence, the American/Australian author of Becoming Jane Austen, a biography on which the film is heavily based (Spence was a consultant on the film), stirred the literary world in 2003 by suggesting that Austen and Lefroy did meet up again in London. (’I can’t think what sparked this idea because there is nothing whatsoever to back it up,’ Le Faye argues.)
*The Editrix and Dorothy do The Wave*
Given such choppy waters, it is perhaps not surprising that the filmmakers cling like a raft to the biography Jane Austen: A Life, by Claire Tomalin, the award-winning biographer, in which she spells out Lefroy’s legacy. ‘From now on she [Jane Austen] carried in her own flesh and blood, and not just gleaned from books and plays, the knowledge of sexual vulnerability; of what it is to be entranced by the dangerous stranger; to hope, and to feel the blood warm; to wince, to withdraw; to long for what you are not going to have and had better not mention. Her writing becomes informed by this knowledge, running like a dark undercurrent beneath the comedy.’
Dangerous stranger? Poor Tom!
McAvoy is older than Lefroy, 27 to his 21, and ‘a bit duller’, he says. ‘I know where my responsibilities are and take pleasure in fulfilling them.’
So did Tom Lefroy–which is why he did NOT marry Jane, and left Steventon when it became clear that he was giving her ideas beyond which he was willing to commit.
So, Jane Austen at a boxing match? Jane Austen with prostitutes? Heaven knows what Austen devotees will make of Becoming Jane.
Honestly, boxing matches and prostitutes are the least of our concerns. We suspect the willful ignorance of this will continue in the media coverage of this film.
February 17th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
Hasn’t anyone ever thought that perhaps Jane had been attracted to someone long before LeFroy showed up? Blood warming and heart pounding are not the exclusive domain of true love, as Jane proved frequently in her works.
[sarcasm on]Of course it’s not possible that Jane could have loved someone no one has a clue about. That wouldn’t be fair. We wouldn’t want to upset the historians, now would we? [sarcasm off]
And is it just me, or are all the comments about how she couldn’t have written the things she did without experience coming only from men? I willing to be wrong here. But when was the last time anyone said about a male writer than he couldn’t have written it if he hadn’t lived it? Seems to me this smacks of blatant chauvanism.
Still I like that blue dress, and her hair looks nice.
February 17th, 2007 at 7:24 pm
Ina asks:
“Hasn’t anyone ever thought that perhaps Jane had been attracted to someone long before LeFroy showed up?”
Yes we have, and she herself give the answer on September 1796, just 8 months after she last saw Tom Lefroy, because she commented to Cassandra in a letter:
We went by Bifrons, and I contemplated with a melancholy pleasure the abode of him on whom I once fondly doated.
*Him* was Edward Taylor, who she might have met in 1794 in one of her visits to her brother Edward in Kent.
February 17th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
But then Becoming Jane, as we discover, is a surprising film in many ways.
I’ll say. The inaccuracies boggle the mind. This article is so frustrating and Mags has deconstructed it well and already pointed out all the bits that make me say “aaarrrgh!” All I can say is good for Deirdre!!!! A voice of reason and sanity in a world of story twisters. I feel increasingly wary of this film. And I thought Anne Hathaway said she was hesitating about this part until she saw Emma Thompson and could not tell her she was turning down the chance to play jane. Very different from “she jumped at the chance to play her literary heroine.” Oh, Jane, Jane, Jane….as you said, resignation to inevitable evils is the duty of us all…
February 17th, 2007 at 8:54 pm
Oops, not anonymous, that was me, Jessica I.
February 17th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
Ina, Claire Tomalin is very much a woman.
February 18th, 2007 at 3:31 am
Oh! I think we’ll laugh at the ‘THING’ in the cinema…or just burst in tears :O
February 18th, 2007 at 10:20 am
Okay, that does it. I’ve lost patience and now will SNARK without repetance when it comes out. I was shoving the spork into my eyes as well. Thanks for your running commentary, dear Editrix. I love their claim at ‘originality’ for using mud et al. But what can expect of a director who says:
‘I’ve always steered clear of Austen,’ admits Jarrold, whose aim is to bring Austen up to date by roughening her up a bit. ‘To me they are often a little bit picture-postcard and safe and nice and sweet. I want more life and energy and fun’. And there’s not just mud there’s slouching as well (which was widespread in P&P05)
Bring out your sporks, bring out your sporks!
I did love Deirdre Le Faye going on about how it’s complete rubbish: ”You might as well say Lady Hamilton was a vestal virgin living in a convent.”
Bwaaaaaaaa, classic!
I do dislike the usual ‘Jane Austen fans are such stick-in-the-muds’ babble but I suppose one should be use to it.
February 18th, 2007 at 10:52 am
Ina, Claire Tomalin is very much a woman.
Ok, thank you Anon. Like I said I was willing to be wrong, which apparently I was.
But I still maintain that no one accuses men of being unable to write things they haven’t lived through. Of course I could be wrong on that too, but until someone points out to me that I am, I will continue railing against the unfairness of it.
February 18th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
Tom is going to take Jane to Brampton Fair, I see. This is what boggles _my_ mind! The only Bramptons I know are in Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, Herefordshire, Cumbria, Suffolk, Northmaptonshire, Norfolk and Northumberland.Each one would be more than an evening’s outing, wouldn’t it? Well, I suppose if Bath is in Ireland, Brampton doesn’t have to be in Hampshire, or anywhere close, does it?
I think they are going to get the inhabitants of Hampshire up in arms wiith this one- even if they are not Freinds-of-Jane. Unsually the Telegraph isn’t so dumb about geography as do something as stupid as to mix up Brompton and Basingstoke, so I assume it’s the moviemakers themselves who have managed to mess this one up.
February 18th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
….’It’s like saying Shakespeare murdered people to give him enough information to write Macbeth. Poppycock. She was a highly intelligent girl. She’d have been a good writer in any circumstances.’
Thank you Deirdre Le Faye! You go girl!
February 18th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
All I have to say is God bless Deirdre Le Faye!
February 18th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
It is so much POPPYCOCK, as Deirdre says. The producers have this nonsensical idea that she was a “dry spinstery old lady” (so wrong) so they pendulum swing over to coquette/flirt to sex it up. Both extremes are so very wrong. Believe us, Anne H., we are just as surprised as you are!
February 19th, 2007 at 1:55 am
“A spinstery old lady”? But… but! She died at age 37! (Or about that– my memory for numbers is not good). Hardly an “old lady.” Or even a “spinster,” really; she hadn’t even hit fourty. Not as young, then, as she’d be today, but NOT a “spinstery old lady”.
And why were they “fascinated by why this woman who had written six of the most successful romantic novels in history had not herself married”? She just didn’t want to.
PS: Deirdre, I think I love you. Marry me? I warn you, I’m “a freewheeling rogue who owns little more than a fully loaded smile…”
February 19th, 2007 at 3:59 am
I thought that Jane was 42 wen she died - which is decidely NOT OLD! (But I would say that, being a middle aged Austen whore of the same vintage, more or less.)
THUMP - that’s my head hitting the desk. Really, her story is very interesting indeed without all of this made up stuff.
February 19th, 2007 at 10:18 am
She was 41 when she died. Remember that she was born in December. Merely subtracting years to get the age doesn’t work with a December birthday. Also, I do worry when reporters — or scriptwriters — give us Eliza de Feuille.
Thump, thump, thump.
February 19th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
Elizabeth, I too noticed that the could not spell Eliza de Feuillide, which, IMHO, means this film spells more trouble for accuracy loving Janeites. Jane was 41 when she died, the age I am now, and I was also born in December. If I am old, those producers can shove that spork someplace unpleasant. Why, oh why, do I feel that everyone connected with this film willfully misunderstands JA?
February 20th, 2007 at 9:41 am
“If I am old, those producers can shove that spork someplace unpleasant.”
LOL!!! You go, Girlfriend! I’ve got a few years on you and another spork to donate to the cause.
February 20th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
LOL:D
February 20th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
lol. Good bit of snark Kathleen.
I was ready to bring out the spork as well when I was reading some of that article, but Mags filled in everywhere that exasperated me.
I too resent the janeite stereotypes. In middle school when I was obsessed with Jane Austen’s novels, all my uncultured and less than civilized peers didn’t understand. [valley girl accent on] what is like…. so great about jane austen anyway. i’m like going over to hollister later and then going to see Step Up and like that movie where everyone gets killed…..wait…uhhh…oh yeah, oh yeah Saw III. You should like come and stuff. [valley girl off]
Then when P&P 05 came out all my friends were like
[valley girl on] OMG have you seen Pride and Prejudice? It’s so hot! I mean, that Mr. Dirby, wait…. Darcy that’s it, is like comparable to Adam Brody. No lie. [valley girl off]
well, needless to say i’ve endured many butcherings of Jane Austen’s genius and works, and I think I can handle this one. But if the producers of Becoming Jane are trying to target “the younger generation” they’ve succeeded (at least on a limited basis). Now a lot of my friends are excited about Becoming Jane and will no doubt believe every scrap of falsehood in it. But it’s all about catering to the majority of moviegoers, and us faithful and “purist” Janeites are not that majority.
February 21st, 2007 at 6:40 am
Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth was marketed as a true story, but it’s not. Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park was marketed as “Jane Austen’s wicked comedy” but it’s not.
Why does this surprise any of us?
I am not a purist. P2 is my favorite Austen adaptation. I happen to like P&P3. A lot. I also don’t happen to be a big fan of Andrew Davies and his obsession with sex.
But Becoming Jane seems as if it’s going to be even less factual than Elizabeth was.
Of course, I’ll probably go see it anyway. *sigh*
February 21st, 2007 at 10:35 am
I liked “Elizabeth” and thought that the intrigue of the court and her precarious hold on her throne was captured well — in spirit. Elizabeth was portrayed as a strong and brilliant ruler. People, well, some people, might be curious enough to read a biography about her. And I’m going to hope against hope that viewers of “Becoming Jane” will do the same.
February 22nd, 2007 at 1:43 am
Elizabeth, most people will not read a biography (and they are not always reliable; it was the biographer Jon Spence who made many assumptions and was consultant for BJ), because IMO we are not a reading culture anymore but a viewing culture. Will people have the patience to read about Jane’s life, or even her books, or will the majority watch this film and think they “know” her? I guess the latter.
They will think what the producers want them to think: “Jane Austen was embroiled in a passionate love affair with an Irish lawyer, Tom Lefroy, that inspires her career” (from a Becoming Jane synopsis). Hogwash.
Wikipedia says this: “Although the film goes well beyond what is provable in assuming a real relationship between Austen and Lefroy, the speculative, original screenplay was inspired by real events, which were also chronicled in a book by Jon Spence, a historical consultant on the film.”
So why not leave the film making about the real Jane to someone that loves her instead of someone who has “always steered clear of Austen,” or says, “We just think of her as a spinstery old lady.” No, Julian Jarrold, WE don’t. Really, please stick that spork where it hurts, sir.
February 22nd, 2007 at 10:54 am
*sigh* I suppose you are right, JI, when you declare that the culture is a viewing one and not a reading one. But I will not go gentle into that line of thinking.
February 24th, 2007 at 5:10 pm
I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised about the tack all the publicity for “Becoming Jane” takes regarding how Jane’s personal love life affected her literary abilities. I was just watching the A&E biography of Jane Austen last night (in the Pride and Prejudice 10th-anniversary DVD set), and I found it also leaned very heavily on the Tom Lefroy affair as a motivator of Jane Austen and her literary life. I wonder if Jon Spence was one of the “experts” behind the biography, too.
Personally, it would not surprise me a bit if Jane herself was the model for Elizabeth. It also would not surprise me if the close relationship between Elizabeth Bennet and her older sister were modelled on the relationship between Jane Austen and her older sister. But I believe it is a stretch to attempt to see parallels between the literature and life of Jane Austen beyond those two points.
February 24th, 2007 at 7:35 pm
Curt–they used Claire Tomalin, I think, and she also makes a bit too much of l’affaire Lefroy IMO.
Elizabeth Jenkins wrote in her (wonderful) biography of Jane Austen that many of Jane’s contemporaries thought Anne Elliot most like her, but she says that Anne Elliot could not have written Pride and Prejudice. I submit that Elizabeth Bennet could not have written Persuasion, either.
February 25th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
My own feeling is that Austen was both Elizabeth and Anne.
I would agree with you that Elizabeth could not have written Persuasion; but she might make a better try at it than Anne Elliot at Pride and Prejudice. However intelligent she was, I don’t think wittiness was part of Anne’s makeup, but Elizabeth’s intelligence and powers of perception at least might give her a fighting chance at Persuasion.
No one can say for sure, of course, but I am inclined to believe that experience can enhance the perceptions and observations of even a genius. I would suggest that Austen could have written P&P at age 40 or even 60, if she had lived that long, because wittiness is not lost as you age; but the author, when she wrote NA, did not have, or at least did not show me, at age 21 or so the emotional depth needed to tackle Persuasion.
February 26th, 2007 at 12:16 am
A rare occasion indeed: I agree with Mags!– EB could not have written Persuasion nor AE P & P. Let’s face it: NONE of her heroines is JA herself. But JA herself CREATED all of the heroines AND wrote all of the novels. Whatever his failings, this is one point Jon Spence makes clear in his book.
Having seen a preview of the film, I have to say that what struck me was how very little of Spence’s book turns up in the movie. About the only thing I can recall that they have in common is that JA and Tom Lefroy fell in love in Hampshire and that they met again in London in August 1796.
February 26th, 2007 at 9:20 am
Of course. “Is” is too strong a word. No one suggests that Jane Austen was one of five sisters or was the daughter of a baronet. And no one suggests that Daniel Defoe had to live for years on an unhabited island before writing Robinson Crusoe. Jane Austen created the characters.
But the fact of the matter is that a witty person will know better than a dull-witted person how to write a witty character. And a sensitve middle-aged person will likely know better than a woman just out of her teens how to write about a sensitive, discreet, intelligent woman. If by chance the post-teenager did have some sensitivity in this area, she would have more at 40.
I say JA “was” EB and AE because their personalties bear such a strong resemblance to what is known about the actual charater of JA. Only Austen herself would know how much they were actually like her, and she is not here to tell us.
February 27th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
I’m jumping late on the bandwagon, but all I have to say to Glenys in #19, that I can’t really agree:
[valley girl on] OMG have you seen Pride and Prejudice? It’s so hot! I mean, that Mr. Dirby, wait…. Darcy that’s it, is like comparable to Adam Brody. No lie. [valley girl off]
I bet, they did NOT say … comparable …