James Bowman on Becoming Jane

He doesn't like it much:

This is so obvious that we are forced to the conclusion that Becoming Jane has made not the slightest attempt to imagine itself back into Jane Austen’s time. Instead, it drags her into ours and so makes her utterly unlike what we know she was. It’s the easiest thing in the world to do, but we know at the outset that it is false as hell. The people in Jane Austen’s time simply didn’t go around thinking that all they needed was to loosen up sexually and allow women more freedom to choose their own destinies. Certainly Jane Austen didn’t. The beliefs about sex and families and money that people held in Jane Austen’s time may have been benighted, but they really did hold them. Not to give them credit for this but instead to treat them as if they were children who simply didn’t know any better — as if they could have been put right by any prematurely "experienced" high school girl of today — is worse than philistinism. It is an act of historical vandalism.