In the late 18th century, a young English woman named Jane Austin plays the piano loudly. It wakes her family up, and they are not happy.

Jane’s parents are desperate for her to get married – especially her mother. So, Jane meets some men as potential husbands. They include Thomas Lefroy, who is a lawyer with a poor reputation, and Mr. Wisley, who is the nephew of the wealthy Lady Gresham.

However, Jane is not impressed with either of them. In fact, she’s not sure if she wants to get married.

But she does still have fun at her family reunion, playing cricket with some guys, and going to different dances. More importantly, she wants to become a novelist.

At some point, Mr. Wisley proposes to Jane. But she declines since she doesn’t love him.

That angers her mother since she’s worried that it’ll put the family at risk of losing their money. Despite that, though, Jane falls in love with Thomas. They spend a lot of quality time together.

Unfortunately, Tom’s uncle refuses to give them his blessing and angrily explains why. This ends up breaking up Jane and Tom.

But can things still improve with Jane’s life?

Despite how the movie was around 2 hours long, its pacing was faster than expected. The scenes also switched pretty quickly.

Sadly, though, the plot was hard to follow at times due to it being confusing and non-linear. Because this was based on a true story, I wasn’t expecting it to follow the classic story structure that fictional tales do. But I do wish the story were more straightforward. Even the plot summary on Wikipedia was not too easy to understand.

Another flaw was the brief nudity shown when a couple of young men decided to swim in a pond. If you’re a parent, I would recommend against showing this to young children. The D-word even gets used.

On the bright side, I enjoyed learning about Jane Austin’s life, even though I’ve never read her books. In addition, I am impressed with Anne Hathaway’s ability to do a perfect British accent while portraying Jane.

I also admired the cast including Julie Walters as Jane’s mother and Maggie Smith as Lady Gresham. And the fact that Wisley sounded like Weasley made all of these remind me of Harry Potter. But Jane’s mom is much sterner than Mrs. Weasley.

The romance between Jane and Tom was mostly sweet. They even wanted to run away some time.

I also liked the depiction of life in the late 1700s, such as the men wearing powdered wigs. But the dance events were particularly fun to watch. Live classical music would play as women and men danced together or in circles.

Overall, I enjoyed Becoming Jane. It was a nice watch about the life of Jane Austin, even if some parts were likely fictionalized.

I give it 4 out of 5 stars.