JANE AUSTEN will be given the Hollywood treatment in two weeks when shooting begins on Becoming Jane — starring Anne Hathaway, James McAvoy, Dame Maggie Smith and Julie Walters. But the £9 million production has already been mocked by Austen experts, for whom the plot is not a truth universally acknowledged.

The film portrays the author as a romantic who is inspired to write her greatest works by a thwarted love affair with Tom Lefroy, a real-life suitor with whom she flirted when she was 19. Helen Lefroy, Tom’s descendant and vice-chairman of The Jane Austen Society of the United Kingdom, has dismissed the “fanciful” idea that Tom and Jane shared a passion that was stifled only by their mothers’ disapproval.

Hathaway, who recently appeared in Brokeback Mountain, will play the author as desperately in love with Tom, a dashing Mr Darcy figure played by McAvoy, exchanging smouldering looks on country walks and on the dancefloors of Hampshire mansions.

Douglas Rae, of Ecosse films, said that the passion would be as intimate as possible within the constraints of late 18thcentury customs. “There is a lot of passion in the film, but it is passion across the ballrooms and the soirées and walks with other people,” he said.

The pair, according to the film, are driven apart by their mothers, played by Dame Maggie and Walters, who disapprove because neither lover comes from a wealthy family.

But Mrs Lefroy, 85, told The Times that this had little basis in fact. Tom, who was about to start practising law at Lincoln’s Inn, would have found Austen too independent in spirit, she said. “What people don’t wish to note is that after he met Jane he became engaged to the sister of his college friend, Anthony Paul. There are letters in Ireland that show she (the sister, Mary) was a fairly simple girl. I think he liked Mary because she was biddable. People of his ability didn’t want intellectuals. He wanted a housekeeper.”

Romantic Austen enthusiasts point to correspondence from Jane to her sister Cassandra on January 15, 1796, which states: “At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over. My tears flow at the melancholy idea.” But the previous day she had written that she did not “care sixpence” about Tom. It is not clear in which letter she was being sarcastic.

Mrs Lefroy, who is Tom’s first cousin four times removed, believes that Austen merely mined Tom for information for her writing. “I do think she realised that her destiny was to write. If she had married and had children she would not have had enough time. And she was so very emotionally tied up with Cassandra that she would not have wanted to leave her.”

TRUE ROMANCE

Shakespeare in Love Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) is inspired to write Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night by a fictional muse (Gwyneth Paltrow)

Braveheart William Wallace (Mel Gibson) has an affair with Princess Isabelle (Sophie Marceau), King Edward II’s wife, who warns him of an English attack. In reality, Isabella would have been about 9 and living in France.

Elizabeth Most historians do not believe that Elizabeth I (Cate Blanchett) slept with the Earl of Leicester (Joseph Fiennes).

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