Becoming Jane (PG)

This period squib purports to make a romantic disappointment of Jane Austen's youth the defining moment of her fledgling career. It derives from research into a brief attachment that the 20-year-old writer enjoyed with a swaggering young Irishman named Tom Lefroy. As played by James McAvoy, he's an amateur boxer and a future Darcy who sees in Jane a kindred spirit - he introduces her to Fielding's raunchy novel Tom Jones - but unfortunately dependent on a great-uncle who has put him through college and is financing his law studies in London. Duty battles with desire, and the outcome can be guessed.

For the first time in her life Austen learnt from her own experience (rather than from books) the painful knowledge of sexual vulnerability, though Julian Jarrold's film - aside from a moving coda, set some years later - hasn't the wit of language or strength of cast to bring it alive. Anne Hathaway, a swan to McAvoy's swain, has sweetness enough but lacks that animating sharpness of mind and tongue that one likes to imagine distinguished the young Jane.

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