Upon my soul, we are due for a perfect frenzy of Janery. It seems no time at all since Miss Knightley delighted us with her presentation of Lizzie Bennet and now we have Miss Hathaway before us, portraying the lady authoress herself, and that agreeable memory will scarcely have faded before two more charming novels are upon us, for both Persuasion and Northanger Abbey are in production. Where once a cinematic adaptation of a work by that prodigiously clever young gentlewoman came by once or twice in a decade, there are now several every year and no actress of any ambition can conceive of a curriculum vitae that is not adorned with an Austen heroine Before we are all engulfed by this avalanche of sprigged muslin and bonnets, somebody should point out that the passion we have for Jane Austen’s doll’s-house world is not healthy. The new biopic, Becoming Jane, which opened at the weekend, confirms that Austen is no longer an author but a brand, a concept that can be replicated for profit as long as there is a market for mush. While the media accountants gloat over the returns, however, any woman writer interested in life outside the drawing room has a fight on her hands.

Artistically, the Austen brand is as restrictive as her heroines’ stays but it is precisely because of their intimate scale that her stories have such a hold on us. Her tiny novels are a producer’s dream. To film an Austen classic you need just a handful of actors, the cheaper and more British the better, plus a stately home; hire a fine pair of hackneys, dust off the last curricle in Ireland and you’re away. In contrast, to film Vanity Fair or Les Misérables means lashing out for battlefields, barricades and two armies of extras.

Austen’s focus on young women’s fancies has made her narratives as universal as oestrogen. In addition, it does no harm that she lived at a time when the fashionable young danced the night away in transparent frocks that made the bosom wobble like two blancmanges on a cricket bat or strode manfully about in bum-enhancing breeches. In retrospect, it’s a wonder that Pride and Prejudice ever survived its first Hollywood outing in crinolines in 1940.

Expert View

Hathaway does a competent, if uninspired, job of playing Jane. But it’s a terrible mistake to cast anyone as beautiful as she is in such a role

Cosmo Landesman

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BACKGROUND

• Becoming Jane

• Becoming Jane - Sunday Times review

• It is a truth universally . . . oh, give it a rest, will you?

• Austen mania

• When she was good

Dressed for success

In The Devil Wears Prada, Anne Hathaway proves that she can crack Hollywood but can she cut it as Jane Austen?

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

BACKGROUND

• Austen mania

• Becoming Jane

There is an excellent pig in Becoming Jane. Ever since the Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice a pedigree pig has become part of the obligatory Austen aesthetic, along with the ditzy-printed dresses, the tinkling spinet and the dashing curricle. The pig typically appears outside the home, wallowing in mud, symbolic of the animal realities that are banished from the prenuptial finessing in the drawing room. This latest pig is a sow who suckles her litter with enthusiasm.

Along with the obligatory pig, most of Jane Austen’s world never made it through the drawing room door. You’d never know it from the novels, but she lived in interesting times. As the film notes, her sister-in-law lost her first husband to the guillotine during the French Revolution. While her oeuvre was gestating, Napoleon’s army ravaged Europe and froze to death in the retreat from Moscow. On the other side of the world Zheng Yi Sao, the pirate queen known as the Dragon Lady of the South China Sea, commanded a fleet of 1,800 junks and 70,000 men.

Had Jane ever looked out of the window, she would have seen her starving country neighbours herding into slums. Had she read of the molecular theory that preoccupied scientists, or joined the philosophical fight to the death between reason and romanticism? Reformers debated A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the feminist polemic by Mary Wollstonecraft, a weaver’s daughter who was politicised by all the horrors of unwed poverty that Austen’s heroines are so frantic to avoid.

A few years after Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813 came a novel by Wollstonecraft’s daughter. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a book that engages far more actively with its world and continues to express our anxieties about the advancement of science. Frankenstein became the keystone of the fantasy genre; it has been filmed almost as often as Pride and Prejudice but Shelley herself, intellectual scion and poet’s muse, has never achieved the same leverage on mass imagination as Jane Austen.

Anne Hathaway portrays Jane as a proto-feminist with professional ambitions and a Katharine Hepburn stride — but the truth is that the world in which she wrote was sexist on a scale that is almost unimaginable today. Wollstonecraft’s work was reviled when it became known that she had not been married when her first children were born. Two generations later, when Charlotte Brontë had the nerve to send a manuscript to the Poet Laureate of the day, Robert Southey, he told her that women ought not to be serious about literature as it would distract them from their domestic duties. Unfortunately for women in general and authors in particular, the dainty, circumscribed world of Jane Austen made it possible for a woman writer to succeed without rejecting those duties. If she wrote domestic satires, a lady author could have it all. Result: Austen became the archetypal woman writer.

Fast-forward two hundred years. and there I was, in my very first editorial conference at an immaculately feminist publishing house, being firmly told to cut the Second World War scenes in my novel because they didn’t belong in “books like this”. Every popular woman writer I know has had the same experience of being cut down to Austen size. Somehow I doubt that his editor told Sebastian Faulks to cut the war stuff out of Birdsong. I’m blaming Jane and hoping for a kung-fu biopic of Zheng Yi Sao. Availability check on Gong Li! Dust off the last fighting junk in Shanghai! There will be a great part for a pig too — in the banquet scene.

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