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Durham Research Online Durham Research Online Deposited in DRO: 21 August 2018 Version of attached le: Accepted Version Peer-review status of attached le: Peer-reviewed Citation for published item: Wootton, S. (2018) 'Revisiting Jane Austen as a romantic author in literary biopics.', Women's writing., 25 (4). pp. 536-548. Further information on publisher's website: https://doi.org/10.1080/09699082.2018.1510940 Publisher's copyright statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor Francis in Women's writing on 08 Oct 2018, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09699082.2018.1510940. 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Durham University Library, Stockton Road, Durham DH1 3LY, United Kingdom Tel : +44 (0)191 334 3042 | Fax : +44 (0)191 334 2971 https://dro.dur.ac.uk Peer-reviewed article accepted for publication by Taylor & Francis for Women’s Writing, 25:4, in August 2018 Sarah Wootton Abstract: This essay seeks to establish whether portrayals of Jane Austen on screen serve to reaffirm a sense of the author’s neoconservative heritage, or whether an alternative and more challenging model of female authorship is visible. Does this particular, and arguably defining, moment in Austen’s legacy offer new and diverse perspectives on the author and her Romantic and post-Romantic contexts? Both films raise troubling questions about adapting (and appropriating) Austen in the twenty-first century, with wider implications for the study of female authors and artists on screen. However, as I hope to demonstrate, the Austens of these biopics are neither reactionary heritage reproductions nor ‘authentic’ Austens. Miss Austen Regrets and, to a lesser but still evident degree, Becoming Jane are in a generative cinematic conversation with Austen’s past ‘lives’ and the author’s present popularity as well as with the narrative style, mood, and tone of her fiction. In other words, ‘Austen’, as the name has come to signify her literary works and the cultural stories she has become the adoptive author of, reads the biopics even as they read her. Austen’s ‘authorship’ in the twenty-first century rests on and is transfigured by a rapidly evolving and mutually informed nexus of co- readings between text and screen. Title: Revisiting Jane Austen as a Romantic Author in Literary Biopics This essay seeks to ascertain whether portrayals of Jane Austen on screen – specifically Julian Jarrold’s Becoming Jane (2007) and Jeremy Lovering’s Miss Austen Regrets (2008) – are, for the most part, neoconservative iterations of a proliferating Austen industry, or whether an alternative and more challenging model of female authorship is visible.1 Does this particular, and arguably defining, moment in Austen’s legacy offer new and diverse perspectives on the author and her Romantic 1 and post-Romantic contexts? Criticism on this topic has tended to focus on the presentation of Austen’s authority, or lack thereof, as a woman writer in the early nineteenth century. An issue underpinning the perceived shortcomings of these films is the extent to which the value and significance of Austen’s authorship is diminished on screen by a cultish devotion to her life and work as ‘romantic’. Critics have employed a range of feminist approaches when considering these biopics and other screen versions of women writers and artists. On the one hand, Margarida Esteves Pereira analyses “the way these two films refashion, or fail to refashion, the biopic from a female perspective”: ultimately, Pereira finds Becoming Jane wanting, “the kind of postfeminist film that […] performs a silencing of feminism”, whereas Miss Austen Regrets “assumes a clear feminist point of view and works to transform the conventions of the female biopic”.2 Bronwyn Polaschek, on the other hand, argues for the disruptive pleasures that can be gained through interrogating male and female spectatorship in postfeminist biopics like Becoming Jane.3 Such debates continue to set the parameters for how we engage with Austen adaptation and they have informed the approach adopted here. The argument that follows is not so much a critique of these valuable positions, but an analysis of whether the prevailing focus on gender politics and genre might be usefully augmented or rethought. This essay poses and offers possible answers to the questions: what are the benefits for Austen studies, as well as for the study of celebrated writers more generally, if literary biopics are considered as enriching chapters in an author’s cultural afterlife; what might these films ‘add’ to the ways we read, research, and teach Austen’s writings? For Sonia Haiduc, “the heroine of Miramax’s Becoming Jane is, in effect, turned into the mother of chick lit”, as Austen’s life is configured through her most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice.4 Haiduc is not the first critic to bemoan the repackaging of Austen as “chick lit”, or supermarket shelf romance, as a result of Pride and Prejudice’s cultural omnipresence and neither is Jarrold’s film unique in presenting Austen’s writing as a mode of autobiography that serves as imaginative recompense for a frustrated love life. Chris Noonan’s film, Miss Potter (2006), which was released the year before Becoming Jane, visually correlates a woman’s creativity with heartbreak.5 Where the young Beatrix Potter looks out of her window to the animated scene of her parents’ carriage pulled by rabbits and driven by mice, the grown woman looks out of her window to watch the man she loves depart in an actual 2 carriage. This filmic echo implies that the relative ‘realism’ of adult romance has replaced childhood fantasy. Drawing and writing offer an outlet for Beatrix Potter’s grief, after the sudden death of Norman Warne, but composition is now a substitute for longings that cannot be fulfilled. Artistry is shaped through suffering. In Lovering’s BBC biopic Miss Austen Regrets, Austen is similarly occupied with authoring the happy heterosexual unions that she will not experience. When called upon to advise her young niece, Fanny Knight, about a suitable husband, Austen, played by Olivia Williams, reflects on as she also re-encounters some of the former suitors she could have married. Persuasion, Austen’s last complete novel, is presented as a panacea for the author’s failing health and disappointed romantic hopes in Miss Austen Regrets. Austen reminisces with an elegiac wistfulness to equal the mood of her last novel and acute illness punctuates her final outpourings of lyric intensity. The author is presented as experiencing shuddering pains immediately after she is inspired to write some of the most passionate passages in Persuasion – among them, “the over- powering, blinding, bewildering, first effects” of Anne Elliot’s encounter with Captain Wentworth following a separation of seven years.6 Yet the film is not burdened by the shadow of her imminent death, signalling something of a departure from screened lives that habitually fabricate a tale of the fatal artistic temperament.7 The range of Williams’s portrayal of Austen nuances any sense of regret; her “age of emotion”, as Austen describes Anne Elliot’s reacquaintance with a now matured romance, is not all “misery” as counterbalance to her heroine’s eventual “delight” (P 46, 165). This is an Austen for whom the freedom to write is bound up with the familial responsibilities of choosing not to marry. This is an Austen who deflates the doomed romance surmised in Becoming Jane with a dismissive comment about Tom Lefroy: “…it hurt me for about five minutes and then it passed”. It is such moments of professed indifference and, at times, witty if wounding insensitivity which guard against both the sentimentality and solemnity that Austen’s writings satirize. This is evident in the following scene which scoffs at the ‘regret’ of the film’s title: Jane: “The truth is…I am she that loved and lost”. […] 3 “I loved and lost, and pined, and yearned. And then swore myself to solitude and consolations of writing about it instead”. Fanny: “Did you really?” Jane: “You read too many books”. This exchange alludes to Austen’s own work through the teasing admonishment of quixotic women readers. Whilst Fanny’s spirited naivety references the author’s heroine, Catherine Morland, the cultural reach of the scene extends beyond Northanger Abbey. This screen Austen seems archly aware of her part in a franchise that assumes a starry-eyed audience on the one hand and a cynical audience on the other. Inferred, perhaps, in the lighthearted reproof, “You read too many books”, is a joke at the viewer’s expense – “You watch too many (Austen) films”. The exchange above also invokes the work and reputations of contemporary authors, with the phrase “swore myself to solitude”. Later in the film, Austen bemoans the fate of her novels – “I send them out into the world to compete with the likes of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron” (original emphasis) – which chimes with the intertextual dialogue over fellow Romantic writers in Persuasion. Miss Austen Regrets channels the author’s appraisal of what she deems to be, with semi-ironic misgivings, the “first-rate poets” (94) of the age when she denounces the public demand for ‘serious’ romance, quipping about Byron and his popular poems: “I prefer to let other people’s pens dwell on guilt and misery”.8 But, as in Persuasion, this screen Austen’s finely-tuned tone takes some of the sting out of her anti-Byron barb.
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