Cleaning up a few lingering links related to Becoming Jane. It seems the rush has passed, at least till August when it hits the Colonies.

ITV Entertainment has an interview with James McAvoy, who seems to be confused between fact and Made Up Story.

She did have a relationship with a young man and she did get excited about the prospects of their future. Things like all the letters and correspondents he sent her during their relationship were destroyed which asks the question, ‘what was in those letters that had to be destroyed?’

Napoleon’s plan for invading England? The Colonel’s Secret Recipe? The secret to nuclear fusion? Hey, any of those are as likely as the actual existence of such letters.

From the We Didn’t Write It, We Just Blog It, So Don’t Blame Us Department, two more reviewers take a turn with the Cluebat of Janeite Righteousness. First up, Emily Hill of spiked steps up to the plate:

ITV are on cue to unleash their Austen season, Andrew Davies will no doubt have Willoughby stripped bare but for a riding crop in a new BBC adaptation of Sense and Sensibility

HA!

If Becoming Jane is anything to go by, Pride and Prejudice is not an ironical character study of a particularly small portion of Georgian society, but a blustering epic of love and longing, featuring an orphan gypsy child called Mr Darcy who runs about Pemberley moor in wet britches, destroying dynasties, and hanging small puppies in pursuit of his soul, his Elizabeth.

HA HA!

The excruciating thing about present-day Austen mania is that it has absolutely nothing to do with Austen. Austen’s genius lies in her wit and her style. Film adaptations, such as the most recent adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, ditch the dialogue in favour of being ‘modern’ and ‘appealing’ and end up being Bridget Jones in sprigged muslin. So it’s not really surprising that in Becoming Jane our hero is just another Bridget, who has to give up her Darcy. Poor Jane, she’s just one of us, a single girl in a single world, dreaming of her own Darcy and scratching away with pen and ink to counteract the tick-tocking inexorability of her biological clock. It smacks of a rather patronising attitude to poor Miss Austen, the spinster low on imagination, that she could not write novels with a hint of invention. It is perhaps interesting to note that there has not yet been a biopic of William Golding in which he was marooned on an island with a load of schoolchildren, or about Tolstoy’s conferences with Kutusov or Nabokov’s penchant for a pre-teen named Delores.

<Harry Kalas> Long fly ball, deep center field, this one’s going, going…that snark’s outta here! </Harry Kalas>

Brendan Cole at RTÉ.ie is next in the batting order, giving the film two out of five stars.

Set during Jane Austen’s (Hathaway) early adulthood, it tells the story of her ‘love affair’ with the young Limerick man James Lefroy (McAvoy). Those of you familiar with the details of Ms Austen’s life may not have heard of this relationship before. Don’t worry: you haven’t gone mad. In the words of co-producer Robert Bernstein; “There are documented facts and we’ve joined the dots in our own Austenesque landscape.” They made it up.

Well, of course they did, darling.

That’s not the only problem, though. Aside from being speculative, Spence’s theory is also horribly un-cinematic when made into a narrative. Of course none of this would matter if the film were any good. It’s not. In fact, it is exceedingly dull.

Yowch! That’s one of those line drives that hit someone in the head and replay constantly on all the sports shows for a couple of weeks.

Incidentally, the Hilton Bath City is offering a special two-day Jane Austen package for those who want to live the fantasy, including a couple of meals, tickets to the Jane Austen Centre and bus sightseeing tour.