Tube Talk: PBS Bio-Pic Is Pure Austen-tation

The drama centers on an unsympathetic heroine who wishes she were a missus.

If the premise of the PBS bio-drama Miss Austen Regrets—that all women live to rue something in their pasts—is true, then my regret is sitting through the whole 90-minute film without changing the channel. In this fourth installment of the "Masterpiece: The Complete Jane Austen" series, writer Gwyneth Hughes presents the novelist in her final years, ruing her spinsterhood, sparring with her much younger niece over men, and generally wallowing in self-pity—all qualities that go unrewarded in Austen's own novels. What would the original think of such a shallow copy?

It's no wonder that fans of Jane Austen's works become obsessed with the writer herself. After all, very little is known about her beyond what you would find in a fourth-grade book report. Yes, there are the basic facts—year of birth, year of death, years of residence in one part of the country and another, not to mention an extensive genealogy—but there is very little insight into her interior life. No diaries survive, and beyond her novels themselves and the tenuous written memories of her surviving relatives, there are just a few personal letters to hint at the character of the person who wrote them.

Nearly 200 years after her death, reconstructing that character is still a feverish trend in the literary world. As Kathryn Sutherland notes in her introduction to the 2002 Oxford University Press edition of J.E. Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen, "it is not facts and information we crave but intimacy and identification." That desire to know the author better—in the same way that readers become intimately acquainted with her heroines—unfortunately leads to wild speculation on the part of critics and biographers, who cast many Jane Austens based not on available information, but on Catherine Morland-style extrapolations of small details.

Miss Austen Regrets provides a perfect example of decontextualizing the surviving source material. Among Austen's surviving letters, the most tantalizing are those addressed to her niece, Fanny Knight, who was 18 years her junior. In these letters, Austen discusses Fanny's love life, particularly whether she should accept a proposal from a certain gentleman and how to read the signs of her own heart. In these letters, she praises Fanny warmly for her complex character and feelings, and it is obvious that Aunt Jane had nothing but the highest esteem for her young niece. It is fun to see how Austen's opinion—whether Fanny should accept or wait for a better offer—oscillates from nearly one paragraph to the next. Her excitement seems genuine, as does her earnestness to prove helpful without overinfluencing Fanny's own thoughts on the matter.

Hughes' script borrows heavily from these letters, placing verbatim lines into face-to-face dialogue scenes between aunt and niece throughout the film. Rather than the comeraderie Austen's letters suggest, Hughes uses these conversations to fuel conflict between the two characters, who get into heated discussions about weighing the values of love and money in marriage. Hughes also paints a Jane (Olivia Williams) who, at 40, flirts shamelessly with men and even begins to have feelings for her brother's young doctor—feelings that cause an unlikely rivalry to develop between Jane and Fanny (Imogen Poots). Frustrated, lonely, and perpetually defensive, Jane becomes more wretched and dissatisfied as her physical condition deteriorates. At long last, the film ends with Fanny's own wedding—three years after Jane's death—and somehow Fanny finally realizes what all her aunt's fuss was about. Unfortunately, the audience is left in the dark.

Whether Jane Austen truly wrestled with loneliness, self-doubt, and long-standing regret can never be known. But it does seem that someone with her wit, intelligence, and humor would not have spent her days in long laments as this film suggests. While the lack of hard evidence leaves plenty of room for biographical interpretations, it seems unfair to bend out of shape the few surviving artifacts. In the quest to know her better, why not look for Austen's thoughts about life and society where they are most well-preserved—within the pages of her novels.


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