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Jane Or Carrie

No matter what the proportion of fact and fiction in Becoming Jane, it is a good story told well. What was true in Jane Austen's time is (with accommodation for the world we live in) true even today making the movie social commentary and not merely historical fiction. Even today, a woman may want to marry for love and even find a man who fits the bill but in the end she might settle for someone who is conventional, acceptable and safe. If marriage is not really her thing, she may choose to remain single. In either case, she will never forget the grand passion or romance of her life and indeed those memories may become her source of inner strength to cope with the mundane-ness of her life. Sometimes a relationship that does not reach fruition as in marriage may be a lot more significant than one which does.

The best love stories are not about the living happily ever after. Instead, it is about having found and then lost (often forever) the one who could have in theory been perfection incarnate. The movie explores all of these theme from a woman's perspective - themes that are hardly irrelevant for the modern day woman. A much more modern slant on love and romance might be Sex In The City.

Like Austen, Bradshaw is an "authoress" but they have little else in common - at first glance. In Jane Austen's time a reading of Tom Jones was bold and suggestive enough, Carrie Bradshaw and friends for all their candid talk about sex might actually miss the provocation because of it's relative subtlety. Unlike Austen, these ladies are in not women beholden to society, family or any man. They live the life they choose to and without apology. Yet, relationships with men are the central theme of their lives just like it was in Austen's time.
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