Becoming Jane
I've been watching the build up to the release of Becoming Jane with interest and some trepidation. It's a major motion picture focusing on a short period of Jane Austen's life.
I'm not against the idea of more Jane and I think a biopic is fine. I also understand that it needs to be at least lightly fictionalised - we don't have enough information for it to be purely factual and, in any case, to make an interesting film it would need to take a fair bit of poetic licence. Real life mostly isn't as entertaining as fiction, that's why we have fiction.
I suspect that I will find the fictionalisation irritating, purely because I'm knowledgeable about the subject. Again, I accept this. If I went to see Miss Potter I wouldn't have a clue how much was true and how much wasn't and it wouldn't spoil my enjoyment of the film, yet a Beatrix Potter fan might well find their enjoyment impaired. The film isn't aimed at me, it wouldn't have the potential to be as successful if it were looking only to attract what Austenblog delightfully and gleefully describes as middle aged Austen whores.
I'm even fairly relaxed about the general principle of suggesting that Austen's experiences in life, including the Tom Lefroy episode which Becoming Jane is centred on, helped her become a better writer. However, where I do start to have some issues is the suggestion, which the film seems to be predicated around, that falling in love with Tom Lefroy and being rejected by his family as not suitable was the great inspiration of Jane Austen's life and led directly to her writing her novels. Essentially, that she was able to write Pride and Prejudice etc because she had experienced very similar events in her life.
I was perusing the BBC news website earlier and came across this article by Lynne Truss, referring to the reaction last week about Steff Penney winning the Costa book of the year award for a novel set in Canada despite the fact that she had never been to Canada. The implication of the reaction was that people can't write about something without having experienced it and oh-my-god isn't it amazing that someone managed it. As Truss's article posits, this is a ridiculous suggestion. You only have to think through a few of your favourite books or films or TV shows to realise that whilst writers draw on their experiences, they aren't just translating what has happened to them with a few different names stuck on. In fact, it is rather insulting to their talent to suggest that they have to have been through something in order to write about it. Let's give writers some credit for their imagination and creativity please.
Jane Austen flirted with Tom Lefroy, along quite a few other men at different times. This no doubt helped her in the drawing of her characters and the richness of her writing. But she by no means wrote P&P because she was trying to recover from a disappointed heart and needed to put her experiences on paper to give Elizabeth Bennet the happy ending she was herself denied. Neither was she incapable of being a great writer until she had personally been through what her characters experienced . The evidence, which I won't detail, pretty clearly stacks up the other way.
I haven't seen Becoming Jane and I can't make any judgements on its approach until I have. But the media coverage to date isn't looking good....