We do believe we’ve been called out. DOROTHY! Bring us the big knife Cluebat!

Some Austen fans have complained that Hathaway should never have got the job. To those people, who have been blogging indignantly for months, the idea that this extravagantly beautiful 24-year-old American, born in Brooklyn, should be entrusted with the task of playing the home-counties spinster who wrote all their favourite novels must seem like the worst kind of Hollywood blasphemy.

Certainly we’ve been blogging indignantly for months (years, even), but not about whether Miss Annie should have the role. We’re a heck of a lot more concerned about the Made Up Story. Not that that doesn’t stop us from snarking when she says something really stupid in the public press. We are unclear if her “people” think it’s cute or charming when she does so or if they are genuinely clueless as to how bad it makes their client appear, but really, the child needs some media training. When we are presented with such opportunities for pure comedy gold, we can hardly be expected to turn them down. This is, after all, AustenBlog.

Nor could one fault her dedication to the role. “I thought, even if I can’t act my way out of a paper bag, they will never be able to get me on the research,” she says, before explaining how she learned to play the piano, reread all the novels, ploughed through numerous biographies and books on the period, and even visited the British Library to read all of Austen’s letters. “I knew who she was when I saw that,” she exclaims ecstatically. “How much she could write! And how many words she could fit into a page! Her script looks like a computer font, it’s so perfect.”

Finally, Hathaway moved to a village in England for the month before shooting began. “I lived in a house and had tea every day,” she says, which accounts for the intolerance she is still showing for her present cup.

By those qualifications, Dorothy could play Jane Austen, and she’s imaginary!

But the interview is not over. Just as I am gathering my stuff together, Hathaway returns. “It’s just something I want to clarify,” she says. “As you noticed, I apologised a half-dozen times throughout the interview, wondering how things were going to sound. The reason is that the one thing that is so difficult to come to terms with is being misunderstood.” To illustrate this, she tells the story of how a friend of hers in India read that she was going to quit acting to become a carpenter, when what she had actually said was that in the next 10 years she would like to study carpentry. “It’s not a matter of, ‘Oh, I’m so worried what other people think about me,’ it’s just that you want the things you say to connect and be clear. I just wanted to make sure.”

Media training means never having to say you’re sorry to journalists. Just saying.

We won’t wax snarky about Dame Maggie Smith–really, you have to love her!

“It was fun doing the film. It was in Ireland, of course, on a shoestring, no time, the usual.”

Hee.

We’re not done with the Evil Austen Purists meme, however.

Scottish actor James McAvoy, very much the British actor of the year after his performance in The Last King of Scotland, plays Lefroy - a lad we first encounter in the film bare-chested and fighting in a boozy brothel. Austen purists may wish to have a little sit-down before going to see Becoming Jane.

Can we just knock it off right now with the “Austen purists will call for their vinaigrettes at the first kiss or sight of bare skin” crap? Honestly–it’s ALL ABOUT THE STORY. The rest of it is just window dressing. Give us the story right and we will forgive many other trespasses.

He is also insistent that Lefroy - who eventually became Lord Chief Justice of Ireland at the time of the potato famine - would not have had an Irish accent, contrary to the thoughts of Becoming Jane’s producers.

“It’s completely disrespectful to an Irishman to suggest the English overlords all had Irish accents, just because you want a bit of the Irish blarney for the American audiences,” he says.

Well, that’s interesting, and we appreciate that Mr. McAvoy thought so deeply about his character. We have read (can’t remember where) that the British accent at that time was actually closer to today’s Irish accent than to the Received Pronunciation accent that most people think of as Posh British (and also is related to the American southern accent). But we’re just an uptight tar-hearted dried-up spinster purist Janeite, what do we know?

Boyd Tonkin in The Independent wonders if the sudden spate of Austen on film might create interest in a Life of Fanny Burney.

It would be unfair, and untrue, to complain, Mr Bennet-fashion, that Jane Austen on screen has delighted us long enough.

Hee hee heeeeeeee! As previously mentioned, we currently are reading Madame d’Arblay’s charming novel Cecilia and are slightly blown away by the obvious influences on Jane Austen’s writing. But we wonder if Miss Beverley, the heroine, was one of those pictures of perfection who made Jane Austen sick & wicked.

In other Becoming Jane news, Douglas Rae complains that Hampshire was too modern and built-up to use as a location for the film.

“All the houses have got swimming pools or helipads or tennis courts. They’ve got extensions and their small rooms have been knocked through. In Ireland, they have still got atmosphere in the rooms.

“I’m afraid to say that 21st century Ireland looks more 18th century than England now. The Irish landscape looks much more Jane Austen than England.

Having been to Steventon, Jane’s home village, which reminded us rather of Brigadoon in its well-hidden retirement (and the failure of random pedestrians a mile or two away, when petitioned for directions, to even have heard of it), we suspect that Dame Maggie’s comment about the shoestring may have had something to do with the choice of Ireland for a location as well. Interior sets can be built in a studio, after all.

The Aussies are getting into the act–Becoming Jane opens March 29 Down Under. Both the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian take note of the dawn of the Fourth Austenzoic Era, the latter including an interview with Jon Spence, whose book Becoming Jane Austen started all this.

He notes some feminists and Austen purists have objected to the idea — pushed by the film — that Lefroy was a seminal influence on Austen’s writing. (Austen was scribbling away well before she’d met the Irishman.)

We have no objection to being called a feminist but do object to the idea that we reject that argument on feminist terms. We reject it because it is insulting to suggest that Jane Austen’s genius depended on some Big Strong Man “introducing” her to the big wide world. Same thing with the “purist” label. Rejecting ill-conceived and unsupported scholarly theories does not make one a purist; it makes one a thinking consumer of literature. We have no objection to Professor Spence creating his own theory or publishing his book, but we can hardly be expected to simply swallow it whole.

American biographer John Halperin, author of The Life of Jane Austen, agrees

Of all the Austen biographers they could have interviewed, they picked John Halperin? Whose Austen biography is risibly bad?

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has produced its own DVD version of Pride and Prejudice, set in Utah and featuring Mormon characters.

They did? We know such a film was produced, but are not convinced that the church itself had anything to do with it.

The Becoming Jane film exposes the chasm between Austen’s wish-fulfilment romances and the near-monastic reality of her own life. While Hathaway’s Austen confronts a life on her own, she ruefully points out that her fictional heroines make “incandescent” marriages to very rich men. (Austen never married but was engaged for one night to a man with the decidedly unsexy name of Harris Bigg-Wither.)

New rule: No one is allowed to feel sorry for Jane Austen for not having married anymore. She chose that life and chose her way. Let us leave her to it.

Thanks to Alert Janeites Amo and Lisa for sending in links!