Becoming Jane News Roundup: Insert Clever Title Here Edition
Not that we’re running out of clever title ideas, but as Alert Janeite Lisa, who sent in a couple of these links, noted, some of these are too good to resist. Fortunately, the clever titles also indicate (in most cases) thoughtful reviews of the film.
The Charleston Post and Courier starts the proceedings with “See Jane write, see Jane pine.”
We know so little about the real Jane Austen that it takes a certain amount of cheek to speculate on her romantic entanglements, real or suspected. The same holds for investing her with sensibilities that may or may not have been claimed even by this writer and woman of independent mind.
Upon her death in 1817, at a mere 41 years of age, many of Austen’s letters were destroyed by her sister Cassandra. We are not even entirely sure what she looked like, apart from a sketch made by her sibling. Nor do we know if the one brief encounter she had in her life ever involved more than a few dances at a ball.
What we do know is that Austen bequeathed to the world six of the finest novels in English literature, rich in irony and uncommonly shrewd on the provincial middle-class mores of her time. But author and character are not necessarily the same, however much we might like to believe in autobiographical intent, conscious or otherwise.
Yep.
Richmond’s Style Weekly goes with a classic: Plain Jane.
One of the reasons we still read Austen’s novels is that we can still see ourselves and those around us in the characters. That’s different from trying to cram our age into hers.
Hear, hear!
The Cornell Daily Sun wins the Internets with its title: Becoming Lame, though unfortunately it is the weakest review of the group.
Becoming Jane is the story of how lame Jane Austen was. Or, at least, how lame those involved with producing Becoming Jane were, and how they tried their best to make Jane Austen seem lame as well.
Though it does have a certain style. 
August 26th, 2007 at 9:24 pm
I was standing the movie line Saturday night and the girl behind me was providing her date with a run-down of the movies available. When she got to Becoming Jane, she said: Oh, that’s just about Jane Eyre.
!