Boyd Tonkin: A Week in Books

As Dame Helen Mirren and her flock of fans (or subjects?) know, the flawless impersonation of a female British icon can take you all the way along the route to global fame. With the Oscar carpets scarcely rolled, the whole story may soon begin again. Anne Hathaway's portrayal of the queen of English fiction reaches its heroine's homeland in a week, when Julian Jarrold's film Becoming Jane opens. The celluloid version of Miss Austen's famously eventless life will, of course, spin off from the scanty evidence of her early romantic disappointment (cue James McAvoy as a dashing Irish lawyer). Don't look to the dream factory for much interest in her painstaking literary craft, forever interrupted when the creaking of a door heralded a summons to some new family task.

Yet biopics, however crude, can still deliver unexpected blessings. In Jane Austen's case, the big-screen makeover might just send a few fans of the novels in search of her supremely witty letters (Oxford World's Classics publish a strong selection, edited by Vivien Jones). With luck, viewers curious about the apprentice Austen will also discover her sparkling juvenilia: the anti-romantic yarn Love and Freindship (sic) and the stunningly subversive History of England - among the funniest works ever written by a teenager.

Among myriad film tributes, Amy Heckerling's Emma-inspired Clueless succeeds better than many costumed plods - because its Californian mall girls echo the sassy and snappy voice that teen Jane first honed on her own behalf. Austen would have scorned the gloopy, literal-minded sentimentality that Hollywood studios bring to women writers' lives (Sylvia Plath, in Ted and Sylvia, and Virginia Woolf, in The Hours, have also suffered). But she might well have chuckled at the class-aware banter that propels The OC.

WH Auden nails the authentic Austen when, in the 1936 "Letter to Lord Byron", he writes of her shocking practicality about the erotics of cash. How disconcerting it can be to see "an English spinster of the middle class/ Describe the amorous effects of 'brass'", and "Reveal frankly and with such sobriety/ The economic basis of society". Deborah Moggach's screenplay for Joe Wright's Pride and Prejudice caught that ruthless undertow. Few other screen Austens ever dare.

Crass or smart, Austen adaptations currently breed as fast as rumours of an elopement at an assembly-rooms soirée. The novels have evolved into a franchise almost as fecund as Bond: a brand that leaves its backers looking (like Emma herself) handsome, clever and rich. So it would be pleasant to imagine that the ever-rising Austen tide could lift a few more Georgian boats.

How about, for instance, a movie that dramatised the extraordinary life of Austen's beloved Fanny Burney? Anonymous author of the sensational Evelina (in 1778), friend of Johnson and the "Bluestockings", royal lady-in-waiting but then (as Madame D'Arblay) an observer of revolutionary France, a witness to Waterloo, aprolific novelist and playwright, a fearless and incisive diarist and letter-writer: Burney packed enough for a half a dozen crowded lifetimes into her almost-90 years. This drama-crammed career can hardly make her own copious fiction rival that of the constrained Jane. But in her Cecilia (1782), it was Burney who called an "unfortunate business" of romantic and financial confusion the outcome of "pride and prejudice". Austen's homage in her novel extends to quotations from Burney, as well as the loan of that perfect title.

It would be unfair, and untrue, to complain, Mr Bennet-fashion, that Jane Austen on screen has delighted us long enough. All the same, others merit their first modern chance to delight us at all. And the astonishing Fanny Burney surely deserves the first dance at the revivalists' ball.