Jane Austen’s Life on Page and Screen

  • Julian North
Chapter

Abstract

When Cassandra sketched Jane Austen in about 1810, she drew a slightly cross-looking, angular woman, arms folded, the lines of middle age beginning to show. As others have noted, the engraved frontispiece portrait in the first major biography, J.E. Austen-Leigh’s Memoir (1870), prettified this sketch, giving readers a softer, domesticated Jane, altogether rounder, younger and more content.1 In 2007 we were presented with the most extreme biographical makeover to date when Becoming Jane, the first big screen biopic of Austen, transformed plain Jane into glamorous Anne Hathaway, a doe-eyed Hollywood beauty.2 The film was set in 1795–6, so of course this was the young Austen, but it still notably improved on the descriptions left by her contemporaries. It was one of many ways in which Becoming Jane departed from the documented evidence of Austen’s life. Apart from other beautifications (the historical Tom Lefroy probably wore his hair powdered and Mrs Austen, by 1795, had lost several of her front teeth), the film also reshaped or invented a number of characters and events. Focused on Austen’s flirtation with Tom Lefroy, it ratcheted up the romantic drama by having Harris Bigg-Wither – here recast as a ‘Mr. Wisley’ – make his proposal of marriage at this earlier period, rather than in 1802. In the film ‘Jane’ simply does things that Jane did not do: she visits Ann Radcliffe in London, for instance, and she elopes with Tom Lefroy.

Keywords

Romantic Love Woman Writer Happy Ending Film Adaptation Female Authorship 
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Notes

  1. 1.
    J.E. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen (London: Richard Bentley, 1870).Google Scholar
  2. See Katherine Sutherland, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 110–17. All subsequent references will be to this edition and will appear in parenthesis in the text.Google Scholar
  3. 2.
    Becoming Jane, dir. by Julian Jarrold (Miramax, 2007).Google Scholar
  4. 3.
    Miss Austen Regrets, dir. by Jeremy Lovering (BBC, 2008).Google Scholar
  5. 4.
    John Wiltshire, Recreating Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 17 and 11. All subsequent references will be to this edition and will appear in parenthesis in the text.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  6. 5.
    On the fictiveness of Austen biography, see also Melissa Pope Eden, ‘“The subjunctive mode of one’s self”: Carol Shield’s biography of Jane Austen’, in Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction, ed. by Edward Eden and Dee Goertz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), pp. 147–71, discussed below.Google Scholar
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    Jon Spence, Becoming Jane Austen: A Life (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), p. x. All subsequent references will be to this edition and will appear in parenthesis in the text.Google Scholar
  8. 7.
    Deborah Kaplan, ‘Mass marketing Jane Austen: Men, women, and courtship in two film adaptations’ [1998], in Jane Austen in Hollywood, 2nd edn, ed. by Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), pp. 177–87. See p. 178. Kaplan’s essay was first printed in a slightly different form in Persuasions, 18 (1996).Google Scholar
  9. 8.
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    See also Karen B. Gevirtz, ‘(De)Constructing Jane: Converting “Austen” in film responses’, Persuasions On-Line, 31.2 (Winter 2010): ‘the growing number of biopics shifts the perception of Austen’s work from great literature to archaeological artefact (at best) or encoded diary (at worst). […] The reiterated claim that Austen wrote her life when she wrote her novels obscures the texts’ significant concerns – about gender, class, power, education, imperialism, love, and families, for example – as well as the notion that Austen, a woman writer, engaged with these issues’ (para. 19).Google Scholar
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    Griselda Pollock, ‘Feminist dilemmas with the art/life problem’, in The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminists and other Thinking People, ed. by Mieke Bal (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 169–206 (p. 93). All subsequent references will be to this edition and will appear in parenthesis in the text. Merlet’s film was controversial for altering the documented rape of Artemisia by her mentor to a consensual sexual act.Google Scholar
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  22. 21.
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    Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield, ‘The mouse that roared: Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park [1998]’, in Jane Austen in Hollywood, 2nd edn, ed. by Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), pp. 188–204 (p. 201).Google Scholar
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    See Griselda Pollock, ‘Feminist dilemmas with the art/life problem’, in The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminists and other Thinking People, ed. by Mieke Bal (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 206: ‘we wait in vain for a film about women, sexuality, intellectuality, and creativity that does not make the woman the sacrificial victim’.Google Scholar

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© Julian North 2012

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  • Julian North

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