Miss Austen Regrets

Miss Austen Regrets

Sunday night The Complete Jane Austen took a break from the adaptations and turned to biography. It's hard to say whether it was good or not. Interesting? Yes. Accurate? Who knows. The thing about having a personal biography about Jane Austen is there is so little about her personal life. Now, we know about her family, schooling, upbringing, and her general relationships. But it's her intimate, personal life that is such a mystery. The thoughts that she must have some great love story in her past to be able to write so many touching and lasting novels on the subject. But the world will really never know. Austen's family burned her personal journals and many of her personal letters after her death--doesn't that in and of its self make you think she had some big secret?

Were there regrets with this adaptation? I never knew Jane Austen, but I know her heroines. She's lovable, because she's Jane Austen. But here she was painted like a great big teenager who was trying to persuade her niece to marry for love--make that love with a fortune. She was a tired, dying Jane Austen with the weight of the world on her shoulders. They throw a past proposal in the mix that I hadn't yet heard of. Tom Lefroy is mentioned a few times. {As a side note: My personal bet is for Tom Lefroy. Any guy who name's his daughter Jane Christmas (Christmas was when Tom & Jane met) still has a thing for his former love interest. Of course, only one or two letters from that period survive.} Jane's mother was painted as a monster, her brothers as men incompetent with money, and poor old Cassandra was the lonely housekeeper.

The older Jane Austen seems largely annoyed, opinionated, independent, jaded, and jilted. The movie seems to say she wrote wonderful novels, attempted to be a woman who provided for her family, but was never really in love. It wasn't the best picture of my Austen. Or at least not the one I'd like to see. {If you're interested in a younger version of a Jane Austen film biography check out Becoming Jane. It's the younger, flirty, independent, opinionated, but yet still forming Jane Austen.}