Becoming Jane (Julian Jarrold): Anne Hathaway, James McAvoy, Maggie Smith, Julie Walters, James Cromwell Running time: 120 minutes

IF JANE Austen had managed to squeeze a biography in between reinventing the novel and dying from an unknown disease at the age of 41, might she have imagined something like this? Julian Jarrold's Becoming Jane is a charming period drama and bubbling comedy of manners.

It transplants the early adulthood and thwarted love life of the great literary matchmaker - who, alas, never married - into the romantically-charged setting of her own novels. For this she is given the qualities usually found of one of her heroines - lots of sense and sensibility - and the pale, raven beauty of Anne Hathaway (the reallife Austen was a bit of plain Jane if a surviving sketch of her is anything to go by).

The film's writers, Kevin Hood and Sarah Williams, have taken Austen's real-life flirtation with Irishman James Lefroy (the film was made in Ireland but it looks like Hampshire) and reimagined it as a full-blown romance, doomed by stifling social decorum and pressure on the clergyman's daughter to marry a man of money rather than sate her romantic heart. ("Affection is desirable, money is absolutely indispensable, " Jane's mother, Julie Walters, reminds her when she turns down the marriage proposal from a suitor. ) If it sounds very much like Pride and Prejudice, that's because it is, but it comes with a real-life unhappy ending of sorts.

If it had been penned by Austen, she might have called it 'Desire and Destitution'.

The story tingles with romance. McAvoy's Lefroy is a devilishly handsome Darcy figure. He lives fast and loose in London, with a penchant for bare-knuckle fighting. Austen's world in Hampshire is prim and ordered. She writes stories in her family's tidy house while her mother frets over how she is going to find a suitable husband.

Lefroy's uncle, Judge Langlois (Ian Richardson), controls the young solicitor's inheritance and, tiring of his high-living, sends him to the country. But he stirs up trouble there too with his cosmopolitan airs and he rattles the composure of the serious young writer.

He scoffs at her efforts as "extended juvenile self-regard" and suggests she needs to widen her horizons. She retorts that "propriety condemns me to a state of ignorance" and McAvoy and Hathaway revel in a rapier cut and thrust of exchange, each volley conducted with an ironic, customary bow.

Soon though, she has him hanging off her frills, while she fends off encouragements from her mother and the local supercilious snob Lady Gresham (played by Maggie Smith - who else? ) to accept the proposal of marriage from Gresham's nephew. But the young lady is a woman of principle - strictly her own - and she will not marry without affection.

It has much in common with the recent Miss Potter, but this tale of proto-feminism and headstrong woman writer unhappy in love is eminently superior, filmed with assured restraint by director Julian Jarrold. He allows it a certain fast-witted daintiness.

But it does not get off scot-free.

You can level the charge that it is a reworking of Pride and Prejudice, which the writers sidestep by showing us that it is this romance that inspired the book. And indeed, there she is, putting ink to paper, the immortal opening line of the famous work: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." Unfortunately for Jane, the good fortune of the single man she loves is contingent on his marrying a woman of his uncle's approval. And Austen, teaching Lefroy's uncle a stern lesson on the meaning of irony at a dinner where she is supposed to be impressing him, does herself no favours at all.

Austen knew something of irony - she did not enjoy a happy ever after - and the film treats her love lost as the inspiration for her great romantic works.

For an American actress, Anne Hathaway's accent is spot-on and she finds the right measure of a young woman deeply sure of herself but unsure of love.

James McAvoy is suitably raffish; Maggie Smith typically withering. It's a film easy to enjoy because it does not take itself too seriously.