How homely was Anne Hathaway? Griselda Heppel tries to untangle fact from fiction
Some years ago, a friend defended a film version of Mansfield Park that portrayed sexual abuse within Fanny Price’s birth family by saying, ‘Oh come on, don’t think that kind of thing didn’t go on in the nineteenth century just as much as today.’ It didn’t matter that the film showed something that never appeared in the book; according to my friend, if Jane Austen could have written it in, she would have done, and that was good enough for her. Jane Austen; gagged by 19th C taboos While this made no sense at all to me, what I found shocking was that this person was by profession a historian; someone who deals in fact, not fiction. Yet here she was, happy to discount the integrity of a classic novel because it didn’t fit her historical view. Perhaps that was her point: Mansfield Park is fiction, not history, so it really doesn’t matter what you do with it. For her, ‘would have,’ in Jane Austen’s case, glided easily into ‘did’. It is difficult for historians. Novelists can ...