Consider the plot: spunky would-be authoress falls in with charming Irish rogue Tom Lefroy. He at first belittles her ambitions, and the two banter "amusingly." They gradually grow to like one another and he, deciding she's too repressed, tries to get her to loosen up by taking her to a gypsy encampment and getting her to read Tom Jones. Meanwhile, she scandalizes everyone with her feminist ways, joining the men's cricket game and declaring that women have the right to support themselves.

Complications ensue when Tom's rich uncle disapproves of Jane because she is poor and outspoken, and when Jane's family pressures her to accept the proposal of a rich but graceless young man so she can ensure herself a living. Top this all off with a ridiculous denouement out of a Harlequin romance, and you've got a recipe for a chick flick in period clothing. Indeed, Austen's writing gets short shrift here, though English majors will enjoy one scene where Jane meets Ann Radcliffe.

James McAvoy charms as the male lead, but Anne Hathaway is annoyingly smug and superior as Austen. Plus, in true Hollywood fashion, she's far too pretty to play plain Jane.

The film does showcase some aspects of Regency life not often brought to the big screen, though, especially masculine pastimes like boxing, cleaning guns, skinny-dipping, and playing cricket. Much attention was obviously paid to recreating period detail in the sets and clothing, and the cinematography shows us a realistically boggy, unromanticized Hampshire.

In the scene when Jane meets Ann Radcliffe, she's surprised to find that the author is far less Gothic in person than one would expect from her novels. Radcliffe remarks that she is only romantic on the interior. One wishes the makers of Becoming Jane had remembered that the same was true of Jane Austen.