Did Jane Austen know true love? Was the wry commentator on 18th-century romance also once an active participant? Did passion once stir in British literature’s most famous spinster? Becoming Jane, a new semi-fictionalised film, takes as its starting point the 2003 biography by Jon Spence which contends that not only did Jane fall in love, but also suggests that the passion and excitement of the experience inspired much of her writing.

It’s a premise that the film’s director, Julian Jarrold, accepts will upset a few of the Austenites, particularly since the film blends known facts with educated speculation and some incidents entirely fabricated for dramatic effect. Let’s be clear: we’re not talking Shakespeare in Love silliness here. Spence’s book is a scholarly study, and the film more than succeeds in achieving the aim of being “true to the spirit of Jane Austen”, if not always adhering to the verifiable truth.

Jarrold, who’s British, has a track record of period literary adaptations, mostly for television, including The Canterbury Tales , White Teeth and Crime and Punishment . His next project, due in 2008, is a big-screen Brideshead Revisited . Evelyn Waugh’s novel has been adapted by Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock and the aristocrat Sebastian Flyte will be played by Ben Whishaw (Perfume). Shooting is expected to take place in Oxford and Venice this spring.

Becoming Jane bodes well for it. The spirited script by Kevin Hood and Sarah Williams combines lines already attributed to Austen with others that one suspects she wouldn’t be ashamed of. But, as Jarrold acknowledges with slight trepidation, Austen fans can be a touchy bunch.

He attributes the unusually protective relationship that British readers have with her partly to nostalgia for the elegant simplicity of the world Austen writes about. “There is a security and cosiness about her. This lovely life-style, without mobile phones — you had plenty of time to yourself, you learnt a musical instrument, you talked very beautifully. It’s the opposite of what we are today.”

However, he feels that this perception of Austen can be off-putting for other potential audiences. “They see a middle-aged spinster obsessed with manners and propriety. That’s one of the things that attracted me — that one is able to breathe a little life into it. Why can’t we think about her aged 21? Why do we have to think about her aged 40 all the time?”

The known facts at the heart of the story are as follows: in 1795 Jane Austen met a young Irishman called Tom Lefroy when he visited his aunt and uncle in Hampshire. Although most of her letters from the period were destroyed at the time by her sister Cassandra, one that remains suggests a flirtation with Lefroy. Jane visited London in August 1796. Spence, her biographer, believes that there is strong evidence that she stayed at the house of Lefroy’s uncle, where Tom himself was living.

Finally, it is known that Lefroy returned to Ireland to practise law and married the sister of a school friend. “In terms of the known facts,” says Jarrold, “we adhere pretty closely. In terms of the Tom and Jane thing, obviously we expand on it. It’s an imaginative portrayal of what might have happened.”

As Jane, the American actress Anne Hathaway brings a clear-eyed vitality and a playful spirit to the role. She’s matched in restless energy by James McAvoy as the dandyish Lefroy. It is terrific casting — the frisson between the two is delicious. But Jarrold has encountered a certain amount of resistance to the idea of an American actress playing that most British of literary institutions, Jane Austen. “It’s fine that James McAvoy is Scottish playing an Irishman. But an American playing English is not allowed. They have to be persuaded.” Jarrold adds that he was intrigued by the idea of casting an American. “I wanted to get away from the old-fashioned, nostalgic, chocolate-box English period drama thing. And Jane Austen in that society is a sort of outsider. She is feistier and brighter and wittier, and kicks against society’s norms. Having an American, or someone from a different background, a different way of acting, seemed kind of interesting.”

The rest of the cast is suitably impressive. Dame Maggie Smith plays Lady Gresham, a prototype for the formidable Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice . Jane’s parents are a Bennet-like pairing of Julie Walters’s sharp-tongued mother hen and James Cromwell’s gentle Rev Austen. But special mention must go to Anna Maxwell Martin, whose portrayal of Jane’s sister Cassandra is profoundly affecting.

Jarrold agrees. “She’s a fantastic actress. When we were shooting the scene when she breaks down, everybody on the set, we all felt heartbroken. It was like somebody had announced a bereavement.”

Given the evidence in favour, Jarrold is inclined to believe that there was an emotional connection of some kind between Austen and Lefroy. “It makes sense to me that there was something there. It’s so telling that it was in the next two years that she rewrote Sense and Sensibility , Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey . And she is constantly obsessed with these attractive men who appear in town. She comes back to it again and again in all her novels.”

Cards on the table — would Austen have been the writer she became if she hadn’t met Tom Lefroy? “That is the contention of the film. It wasn’t Tom Lefroy specifically, it was the experience. But I think it was very important and formative and it fed into the books.”

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