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Saturday, August 25, 2018

Miss Austen Regrets (2008)

It is so startling to me when I think about it that I really do love all things Jane Austen.  It goes beyond the books themselves, which I do love, but I have watched a number of film renditions of them, including strict adaptations as well as modern updates.  I loved PD James sequel to Pride and Prejudice, and I have enjoyed other movies that revolve around and star Miss Austen herself. 
In point of fact, I think you do have to be at least a little Jane obsessed to truly enjoy this story.  The writer steeped herself in Austen's own letters to pull together the threads of a story into whole cloth and here it is.
Austen's beloved young niece, Fanny (played charmingly by Imogen Poots), asks the author, who is happily unmarried at 40 to look over her potential husbands, which gets Jane thinking on her own suitors. Her memory alights on the ones that got away; in a flashback, we see that when the author was 27, a rich neighboring landowner, proposed to her. She initially accepted, but after a long dark night of the soul, the next day she turned him down. The rejection condemned her family to live in a sort of upper class poverty, and her mother never lets her forget it.
Jane reflects wistfully on the fact that this episode put her off the very idea of marriage. Consequently, she never settled down with her soulmate, the Reverend Brook Bridges (Hugh Bonneville), a clergyman who could wait no longer and ended up marrying someone else. It is a poignant tale of missed opportunities.  And regret, with the wistfulness that you would expect from an Austen story.

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