Jane Austin Today

This is only the beginning of the Jane Austen makeover. A new film about her will come to this country in August. It is called “Becoming Jane” and stars Anne Hathaway, who was last seen in “The Devil Wears Prada.” Ms. Hathaway is indeed a becoming Jane. Publishers of “Emma” and “Pride and Prejudice” and the rest of Austen’s works should simply reprint a still from the film — Ms. Hathaway in Georgian costume, superbly blushed and coiffed and playing cricket — and call it “Jane Austen,” with the quotation marks. The novels would be so much richer if only we could believe they were written by a looker.
I reread “Emma” recently and found myself wondering, what if we knew as much about Shakespeare’s life as we do about Austen’s? And what if we knew as much about Austen’s life as we do about Virginia Woolf’s? No one would give up the chance to have 150 letters by Shakespeare or 26 years of copious diaries by Austen.
But the work always stands apart from the life, no matter how much we know. No amount of biography — no grasp of the details of the life as it was lived — ever accounts for the transfiguration that takes place in the work itself. You can search all you want in the life, but you will never find the ghostly separateness, the act of imagination, in which the work emerges.