Film

The trouble with Jane Austen is that she only wrote six novels and some juvenilia, leaving filmmakers far too little material. Screenwriters Kevin Hood and Sarah Williams have come up with a fresh solution: They’ve made a surprisingly pleasant, very Austen-ish film about Jane Austen’s youthful romance with a man named Thomas Lefroy. It has long been known that Austen had a flirtation with a young Irish law student named Lefroy in the winter of 1795–6, but recent scholarship by Jon Spence (whose 2003 book lends this film its title) suggests it was more than that. Austen may have met him again in London, and was definitely saddened to hear of his engagement to another woman in 1797.

Hood and Williams take that slim data and run with it. They make the Austen household and its surrounding environs pleasantly familiar to fans of Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility. Jane’s father (Cromwell) is loving but impractical, her mother (Walters) hopes for a romantic match that will raise the family fortunes, Jane’s sister (Martin) is sweet but plain, and Jane (Hathaway) is gifted with words but a bit full of herself. Along comes slightly rakish Lefroy (McAvoy), whose sophisticated London ways bring out Jane’s impertinent wit and eventually her love.

We bet you were expecting us to go off on the historical inaccuracies or bemoan the silliness of building a romance for one of history’s most famously single women. Sorry to disappoint, but we rather enjoyed this. Hathaway is surprisingly convincing, McAvoy does well in the Darcy stand-in role, and Jerrold is able to sneak in a lesson about how life experience shapes a writer’s art.