Everyone knows we’re all about the snark here at AustenBlog, but we think there is, in some parts, an impression that we do it just for the sake of being mean. Nothing could be further from the truth. The main objective of this blog is to share news of interest to Jane Austen fans with other Jane Austen fans. But hey, we are Jane Austen fans, and that means we kind of like snark. We like humor. We like irony. And sometimes they just make it too darned easy.

Alert Janeite Carmen sent us a link to an interview with Anne Hathaway, who pretty much shows why actors playing a historical personage should never be viewed as experts on that person.

In fact, it was “Persuasion” that convinced me I was really doing the right thing by telling this story. Tom Lefroy was born in Ireland and maybe this is nothing and maybe I shouldn’t have hung my hat on this one fact, but in the story, Ann Elliot is attending a concert, and Captain Wentworth has arrived and everyone is so impressed with him, including people who disliked him before because he was poor. He arrives and Catherine overhears someone talking about him, someone who had previously denigrated him, and this person said, “Oh, who is that very impressive young man? He has an air about him. Irish I would think.” I don’t know if that has anything to do with Tom Lefroy, but it seemed fitting.

Catherine? She means Anne, of course…but let us give the correct quotation from the novel, which is repeated verbatim in the film:

“A very fine young man indeed!” said Lady Dalrymple. “More air than one often sees in Bath. Irish, I dare say.”

The Dowager Lady Dalrymple likes to think Captain Wentworth is Irish, because the Dalrymple viscountcy is an Irish title. (Recall during the section describing the former estrangement of the Dalrymples and the Elliots a mention of the “unlucky omission” of a letter of condolence to Ireland upon the late Viscount Dalrymple’s death.) Irish titles were considered not as good as British titles, and indeed even a little vulgar. One of the somewhat-hidden amusements of Persuasion is that not only are Sir Walter and Miss Elliot hilarious in their toad-eating of Our Cousins The Dalrymples because of the title, but they are even more hilarious in toad-eating Lady Dalrymple because it is an Irish title. If it is a reference to Tom Lefroy, well, there goes the whole Unforgotten Love Of Her Life theme out the window.

We’re not deliberately trying to mislead the world about Jane Austen. We really did as much as we could with the information we have.

Did as much as you could with it? You can say that again.

She was in her middish ’20s when her parents decided to move to Bath and she was very unhappy there, didn’t write for ten years, and when she moved to Chawton afterwards, which is very similar to Hampshire, pretty close to it as well, that’s when she really began to write again.

Chawton is not only near Hampshire, and very similar to Hampshire, it is in Hampshire.

We know now how Catherine Morland felt when she had to explain to John Thorpe that The Mysteries of Udolpho was written by Mrs. Radcliffe. (Everyone shout together: “Are there no other villages in Hampshire?” If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll get that joke.) She probably meant to say Steventon and not Hampshire. We hope so, at least.

There was a real necessity back in Jane Austen’s time that you had to be taken care of by a man.

Tell that to Miss Woodhouse!

See what we mean? It’s just too easy sometimes. There’s no sport in it.

We liked Lev Grossmans’ article about Jane Austen in Time, which we linked to earlier for the new tidbit about Olivia Williams’ starring role in Miss Austen Regrets. We encourage you to check out the rest of the article, which is quite good.

It may have been brutal and unfair, but it is an essential aspect of Austen’s authorial personality that she did not rail against the system she wrote about, or try to change it.

We think she did rail about it, just in a very understated and subtle way.

In her life Austen played the marriage market and lost, but it’s presumptuous of us to assume that she was unhappy because of it. After all, there are other kinds of happy endings besides love, and this is a truth that Austen surely knew, even if she chose not to write about it in her work.

Hear, hear!

Austen scholar Deirdre Lynch writes in Slate about the obsession with Jane Austen’s love life.

Austen wrote on many subjects: women’s lack of freedom, the injuries wrought by the 19th-century class system, literature’s falsification of life, the importance of manners, the virtues of independent thought. But, by and large, it is Austen the expert on courtship rites who dominates contemporary popular culture. It is this Austen who is emulated by authors of middlebrow women’s fiction, from Helen Fielding (who wrote Bridget Jones’s Diary) on. A few of the students who enroll in my Austen courses admit that they are there to trawl the books for dating tips.

That last bit is rather scary.

Lots of reviews…we’ll try to link as many as we can, but will not comment on all of them. Most of the reviewers seem to like the film to some degree, though with the qualification that of course it’s a Made Up Story. Most who don’t like it, don’t like Jane Austen anyway.

We think E!Online’s Reel Girl makes a good point:

Now, this movie is supposed to be about how Jane came to be the genius that we know, adore and study. The trouble is that Jane Austen didn’t “become” Jane Austen simply through a series of breakups. Otherwise, we would all be Jane Austen!

The Boston Globe has a good review by Ty Burr.

Anne Hathaway’s Jane is headstrong and clever, balanced and true, but you never sense that restless observation — the constant seeing what others miss — that’s present in every word Austen wrote. “Becoming Jane” is astute enough to recognize that art can make up for the failings of life (”Will all your stories have happy endings?” Jane is asked toward the end, and we all know the answer to that), but the movie makes the understandable mistake of treating the artist as one of her own creations. It’s an appealing notion. All you have to do to outgrow it is read.

Other reviews: The San Diego Union-Tribune; The San Francisco Chronicle; BuzzSugar; The Houston Chronicle; The Los Angeles Times; NPR; F.O.J. (even though he liked MP99) Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times; and Reuters.

Thanks to Alert Janeites Lisa, Molly, Jenn, and Bethany for sending some of these links!