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.
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Notes
J.E. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen (London: Richard Bentley, 1870).
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.
Becoming Jane, dir. by Julian Jarrold (Miramax, 2007).
Miss Austen Regrets, dir. by Jeremy Lovering (BBC, 2008).
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.
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.
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.
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).
Joe Bray, ‘Austen, “enigmatic lacunae” and the art of biography’, in Romantic Biography, ed. by Arthur Bradley and Alan Rawes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 58–73 (p. 58).
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).
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, ‘Critical responses, recent’, in Jane Austen in Context, ed. by Janet Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 101–10 (p. 104).
Almost all the evidence comes in Austen’s first two surviving letters, written to Cassandra and dated 9–10 and 14–15 January 1796, in Jane Austen’s Letters, 3rd edn, ed. by Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 1–4. See also p. 19. For the testimony of Lefroy that he had experienced a ‘boyish love’ for her, see William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: A Family Record, revised and enlarged by Deirdre Le Faye (London: British Library, 1989), p. 252.
Nadia Radovici, A Youthful Love: Jane Austen and Tom Lefroy? (Braunton: Merlin Books, 1995), p. 3. All subsequent references will be to this edition and will appear in parenthesis in the text.
David Nokes, Jane Austen: A Life (London: Fourth Estate, 1997), pp. 160–61. All subsequent references will be to this edition and will appear in parenthesis in the text.
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.
See Julian North, The Domestication of Genius: Biography and the Romantic Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Jan Fergus, Jane Austen. A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), p. ix. All subsequent references will be to this edition and will appear in parenthesis in the text.
Jan Fergus, Jane Austen. A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), p. 78.
Deborah Kaplan, Jane Austen among Women (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 108. In her essay ‘The disappearance of the woman writer: Jane Austen and her biographers’, Prose Studies, 7.2 (1984), 129–47, Kaplan criticized existing Lives of Austen for effacing her as a woman writer by defining her life as uneventful and called for a new biographical approach to counter this.
Deborah Kaplan, Jane Austen among Women (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 165–66.
Deborah Kaplan, Jane Austen among Women (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 129–30. See also Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1997): ‘We would naturally rather have Mansfield Park and Emma than the Bigg-Wither baby Jane Austen might have given the world’ (182). All subsequent references will be to this edition and will appear in parenthesis in the text.
Park Honan, Jane Austen: Her Life (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1987), pp. 2–3.
Park Honan, Jane Austen: Her Life (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1987), p. 3.
Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1997), pp. 108–11.
Carol Shields, Jane Austen (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001).
Melissa Pope Eden, ‘“The subjunctive mode of one’s self”: Carol Shields’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 (p. 149). All subsequent references will be to this edition and will appear in parenthesis in the text. Sheila Kineka, ‘Subject to change: The problematics of authority in feminist, modernist bio graphy’, in Rereading Modernism, ed. by Lisa Rado (New York: Garland, 1994), pp. 253–71, quoted in Melissa Pope Eden, ‘“The subjunctive mode of one’s self”, p. 148.
Sheila Kineka, ‘Subject to change: The problematics of authority in feminist, modernist biography’, in Rereading Modernism, ed. by Lisa Rado (New York: Garland, 1994), pp. 253–71, quoted in Melissa Pope Eden, ‘“The subjunctive mode of one’s self”: Carol Shields’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), p. 148.
Carol Shields, Jane Austen (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001), p. 9.
Carol Shields, Jane Austen (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001), p. 146.
Carol Shields, Jane Austen (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001), pp. 29–30.
Carol Shields, Jane Austen (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001), p. 42.
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 (p. 180).
George F. Custen, Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), p. 75.
Jan Fergus, ‘Two Mansfield Parks: Purist and postmodern’, in Jane Austen on Screen, ed. by Gina Macdonald and Andrew Macdonald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 169–89 (p. 71). See also John Wiltshire, Recreating Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 135–8.
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).
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’.
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North, J. (2012). Jane Austen’s Life on Page and Screen. In: Dow, G., Hanson, C. (eds) Uses of Austen. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137271747_6
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