janeaustentextposts:

I really enjoyed it. There’s just so much about it that made it stand out, for me, from the kind of typical way Austen-based narratives get zhooshed up into a more cookie-cutter romance. (Which happens, I understand, and mostly I accept it as a starting-point of just getting these adaptations made in the first place, even if things get pigeon-holed into the standard elegant pining.)

There’s been a fair bit of comparison to the other major speculative Austen biopic Becoming Jane (most of it favouring Miss Austen Regrets, and rather deservedly so, in my opinion,) but MAR is entirely capable of standing on its own merits without drawing comparisons. The stand-out element, for me, is the focus on the lives and relationships between women at all stages of life. The accord and clash between the varying viewpoints of Jane, Cassandra, Fanny, Mrs. Austen, and even Madam Bigeon provide a range of experience and perspective that I was really hungry for, in a period drama. All of these lives which leave so little in the historical record still felt so precious and mysterious and real–it brought Jane Austen, the woman, to life in a new way, as well as examining the structures of society and family which both supported and hindered Austen as an unmarried genteel woman.

Also every woman in the cast could run me over on a bike and I’d say thank you. Buy that casting director a round.

In some respects, MAR is very similar to the film Belle, in that it draws on what very little we know of an historical figure and then illuminates the possible circumstances of their world and breathes life and humanity into them in a way I find moving and complex and wonderful.