Miss Austen Regrets

This is a good movie for those who love Jane Austen (and similar movies). In the beginning i had to get used to this Jane but when i did i could get lost in the movie. A brilliant movie with a lot of accuracy about Jane's life. Of course not all of it is accurate but they are forgiven since this is a movie and not a documentary. People can't help comparing this movie with "becoming Jane" but this movie basically picks up where "becoming Jane" left of. All in all a must watch for fans of Austen and other period drama movies.

If you've read her novels and love the world she creates, you will understand them so much better after seeing this BBC production. Beautifully directed and acted, it captures the person she was, witty, sensitive, a romantic at heart and yet ever so practical - even cynical in realising a good marriage is the only way a woman could lead a comfortable life. But never, not once, does the movie seem staid, or boring. It is effervescent, delicately handled and poignant. Fans of Jane Austen will love the unobtrusive inclusion of quotations from her books, the references to her most loved characters and the irony of her never finding a Mr Darcy in her own life. It moved me deeply.

As one of the many Austen fans still smarting from the vacuously boring Becoming Jane, I was nervous about this. As if sensing this apprehension, Miss Austen Regrets set off at a gallop. One and a half minutes in and we are already over the worst hurdles. We have a talented, intelligent lead - an innovative, sparkily humorous script - tactful and assured direction. Phew!

All memory of the toxically banal Ann Hathaway as the younger Jane evaporated as the lovely Olivia Williams settled into the part - so successfully that the sideswipe the writer takes at the earlier production 20 minutes in seems inappropriately vengeful.

Without hitting the exact spot, this was very, very much better.

It played on safer ground. It portrays Austen between the publication of Mansfield Park and Emma, just starting on the first draft of Persuasion and surrounds her with characters with credible lives of their own. It does an excellent job of demonstrating just how fragile was the life of even a woman successful and famous enough to be a guest of the Prince Regent. Only by marriage rather than as a result of her work can Jane support her family in their modest style of life. Questions over her brother's estate threaten the house she lives in but can never own. This insecurity is what Miss Austen really regrets.

All the minor performances are what you'd expect from top-drawer BBC period drama and Olivia Williams and Imogen Poots are excellent in the two central roles of aunt who hasn't given up flirting and the niece about to become engaged who is still learning the ropes. The whole production portrays an interesting life, full of love, frustration, struggle and uncertainty about life's choices, and does something like justice to one of the greatest authors of literature and her most intimate concerns.

So, if you've seen neither of the two recent dramas about Jane Austen's life and you're prone to kicking the cat when angered, make absolutely certain that you see this one first.

I have watched this movie because I love Jane Austen's books, and because I have seen "Becoming Jane", and because I have read a TLS review of it. But, somewhat to my surprise, it is not Austen's biographical details – true or false – that were my main attraction. The point is, the movie tells an important truth (apart from delivering a series of trite statements on men-women relationships, which are all trite because they are so true…) about life stories, or the ways people think – and talk – about their lives. They oscillate – at least Jane did, as many of us do – between regrets (in spite of the title, the movie is NOT about regrets) and the idea that one could have made a "better" decision, and the feeling that the decision was absolutely right ("I have won my freedom"), and yet another feeling, that there was no decision at all, just a coincidence, which (Freud would have said) expressed the true longings and desires, or (some other people would have said), ended up as it did ("things turn out for the best", the movie says). I would hate to think that people see that movie as "just about Jane Austen" – much as I admire her, it is about all of us, and importantly so...

The Austen Industry ensures that almost every year there is a new production of either one of her books, or of films about how us moderns are affected by her work (The Jane Austen Book Club, Lost in Austen)almost two centuries after she lived. This film turns the spotlight away from her characters to the author herself, and does it wonderfully well: we see her as sister, daughter,and aunt, a creature of flesh and blood who is not beyond the occasional infatuation in middle age. Well cast, well acted and all that one expects from a satisfying period drama. For an hour and a half I was transported from monsoonal India to nineteenth century England -- what more can one ask for!