Jane: Here, there, everywhere

Hugh Dancy and Maria Bello in Robin Swicord’s film version of “The Jane Austen Book Club.”

So much of Jane Austen's work revolved around finding men of means to marry young women whose families were in fairly desperate financial straits. Rather than spinning in her grave at the knockoffs of her books, Jane must be smiling at the number of women who have profited from marketing their own takes on her stories.
Are you a secret Jane Austen fan? Did you love Alicia Silverstone's well-intentioned meddling in the movie “Clueless”? Is Bridget Jones one of your guilty pleasures?
The first is a hilarious contemporary Beverly Hills update of Austen's Emma, and Bridget is a direct descendant of the young Austen heroines longing for love above their social station. Amy Heckerling wrote and directed Clueless; Sharon Maguire directed and Helen Fielding wrote the novel and the screen play. A guy, Guy Andrews, wrote time-traveling Lost in Austen, but two women produced the mini-series for Britain's ITV. It's available on DVD and worth seeing for the fun of watching a modern Austen devotee suddenly transported to the plot of Pride and Prejudice, and trying to manipulate the outcome.
Karen Joy Fowler's novel The Jane Austen Book Club captures the Austen spirit beautifully, gleefully. The Davis author considerately provides an appendix guide to the Austen novels for the non-devotee. You don't need it to appreciate this sly and charming tale of six months with a California Central Valley book club that's "All Jane Austen, all the time." Robin Swicord directed and wrote the screenplay with Fowler.
Relationships end and begin, strawberries and margaritas are consumed in the summer heat, and the five women and one man reveal themselves in their reactions to the novels.
Bernadette, at 67 the oldest member, (and the funniest)has officially given up on romance; she wears mismatched socks and pulls off a surprising coup. Allegra, the lesbian, focuses on Austen's writing “about the impact of financial need on the intimate lives of women. If she'd worked in a bookstore, Allegra would have shelved Jane Austen in the horror section." Jocelyn, the never-married dog breeder and born match-maker, finds herself captivated by an unexpected match and by science fiction/fantasy (which Fowler also writes).
Veteran book-clubbers will appreciate the intimacy and loving support that triumph over occasional exasperation with each other.
There's a superficial resemblance to that other novel of Central Valley women, How to Make an American Quilt, but this is far richer, as post-modern meta-fiction should be.

If those don't satisfy your Austen hunger,there is always the 2007 Becoming Jane, an imagining of a possible romance gone awry. Jane (Anne Hathaway) has already decided to earn her living by writing when she meets dashing young Irish lawyer Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy), who takes a far bolder and more direct approach to romance than typical Austen suitors.
It's great fun to watch a fine cast-- especially Maggie Smith -- shape-shift into the memorable Austen characters. Just don't take it too seriously.