So why not reimagine Austen as a lithe brunette with pillowy lips and airbrushed skin, a magnificent creature who looks remarkably like Anne Hathaway? And why not give her a bold, witty suitor — James McAvoy, anyone? — who looks smashing in his velvet frockcoats and dashingly masculine leather boots? Part of the pleasure of watching movies comes from looking at beautiful people: Choosing a “plainer” Jane (there are very few likenesses of the author for us to go on, anyway) wouldn’t have made “Becoming Jane” a better or more authentic movie, but perhaps only duller to look at.

The problem with “Becoming Jane” is that it snaps all too snugly into a modern template of romance, instead of going to the trouble of imagining — since we’ve already acknowledged that imagining is what we’re doing here — what romance may have meant to the real Austen. “Becoming Jane” takes as its premise a few measly letters, written by Jane to her sister, Cassandra, about a young man she had the pleasure of meeting a few times. There’s no law that says imagination can’t be applied to the lives of historical figures, and in movies, sometimes a little extra embroidery can actually help capture the spirit of a life, as in Sofia Coppola’s vibrant brocade tapestry “Marie Antoinette” or Philip Kaufman’s tattered-lace spectacle “Quills.”

But even though “Becoming Jane” struggles, in obvious ways, for authenticity — to the untrained eye, at least, the country dance looks about right; the ladies’ dresses are suitably Empire — it has still been slapped with an insidious and thoroughly modern gloss. Sure, some of the characters pay lip service to the reality that in Regency England, women weren’t allowed to inherit property; their only chance for economic well-being was to marry well. Even so, we have James Cromwell as Mr. Bennet — oops, make that the Reverend George Austen — saying to his fluttery wife (Julie Walters), “Jane should have not the man who offers the best price, but the man she wants.” You can just hear the hearts of a million teenage girls — and some older ones — set audibly aflutter.

As Katharine Hepburn supposedly said of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, she gave him sex and he gave her class. In this brave new Austenworld, it’s the other way around. Lefroy, believing Jane has to live a little, or at least read a bit more adventurously, if she’s to become a better writer, gives her “Tom Jones” to read, and as she turns the pages, her eyes bug out like the wolf in Tex Avery’s “Little Hot Riding Hood.” She’s shocked — shocked! — by the book, and tells Lefroy she disapproves on moral grounds. Still, we can hear the delicate gears shifting around in her pretty little head. Lefroy is the kind of guy who thinks nothing of stripping off his shirt — yowza, girls! — and joining a boxing match among the lower orders. Jane doesn’t bemoan his scrappiness; she warms to it. She may be a lady of letters, but opposites attract, and who knows? This very different guy just may come in handy if she gets around to writing that ultrafamous and beloved novel she’s got buzzing in her noggin.

I suppose “Becoming Jane” might have worked as a flight of fancy, if only it didn’t seem so calculated to cash in on the weird contemporary Austen-mania phenomenon, to grab a piece of the pie that’s already stuffed with “What would Jane knit?” tote bags and T-shirts emblazoned with the shamelessly self-promoting slogan “An Elizabeth in a Darcy-less World.” (I wish I were making this stuff up.) “Becoming Jane” is packed to the rafters with marvelous actors, among them Cromwell and Walters, the always unsinkable Maggie Smith and Anna Maxwell Martin, who played Esther Summerson in the fine 2006 PBS adaptation of “Bleak House.” McAvoy is lively and eerily believable in this rather dumb role. But Hathaway — who still may, I believe, prove herself to be a very good actress — is stiff and awkward here, and I can’t believe it’s completely her fault. Her quivery lips and liquid brown eyes turn her into a romance-novel version of Jane Austen — which is, perhaps, what the imagined target audience of this movie wants to see.

I wonder what the Austen acolytes troubled by Joe Wright’s 2005 adaptation of “Pride & Prejudice” (which I loved) will think of this weird effort to remake Austen’s life — about which we actually know very little — into a genteel, tasteful Harlequin romance. Was Austen really a smarter, feistier Carrie Bradshaw in more sensible shoes, longing for love even as she failed to hang onto it? “Becoming Jane” would have been more honest if it had been called “No Sex in the Country.”

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single girl in possession of her right mind must be in want of a decent man” … “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a 30-something woman in possession of a satisfying career and fabulous hairdo must be in want of very little” … “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young Austen heroine must be in want of a husband, and you are no exception.”

A trail of Austen-related chick lit, instructional manuals and choose-your-own-adventure books — all designed to imaginatively send modern women back two centuries — leads up to the Aug. 3 release of Miramax’s highly imaginative “biopic” about Austen, “Becoming Jane,” and September’s filmed adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler’s “The Jane Austen Book Club.” In January, PBS will air new British adaptations of “Persuasion,” “Sense and Sensibility,” “Mansfield Park,” “Northanger Abbey” and “Miss Austen Regrets,” yet another biopic, on Masterpiece Theatre.

Besides the Miramax movie’s companion volume, “Becoming Jane: The Wit and Wisdom of Jane Austen,” there is also “Dear Jane Austen: A Heroine’s Guide to Life and Love,” “The Jane Austen Handbook: A Sensible Yet Elegant Guide to Her World,” “Lost in Austen: Create Your Own Austen Adventure,” and the novels “Me and Mr. Darcy,” “Austenland,” “Just Jane: A Novel of Jane Austen’s Life, “Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict,” “Cassandra’s Sister: Growing Up Jane Austen” and “The Rules of Gentility,” which is somewhat redundantly billed as “‘Pride and Prejudice’ meets ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary.’”

In 2007, it’s still Jane Austen’s world (or some mangled approximation of it); we just live in it.

How many 200-year-old authors of just half a dozen novels get this much play outside the ivy-covered walls of the academy? For that matter, despite complaints about current celebrity culture, how many scantily-clad half-wits get this much play? You can buy Austen puppets, dolls and posters, along with bumper stickers and tote bags that read “What would Jane knit?” and “Prepare yourself for something very dreadful.”

Part of what differentiates this round of Austen consumption from dozens of past infatuations is the degree to which the satiric acid of Austen’s work seems to have been drained and replaced with 100-proof, widely accessible romance.

“It’s all about the dresses,” laughed Rachel Brownstein, professor of English at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center at CUNY, when I asked her about the current bout of Jane-itis. She was only half joking. “Everybody really wants to be Jane,” she elaborated, meaning that they all want “to wear long ball gowns and go to dances and be genteel,” not that they want to live in constant financial jeopardy and die single in their early 40s.

Brownstein suggested that in addition to a frock, readers may want to borrow some perceived strength from their favorite author. Reading Austen’s books, in which bright, funny and not-always-beautiful women tend to win the day, “you get a sense that you can be sexy and self-expressive in a way that women feel they’re not allowed to be,” she said. “Jane Austen, in spite of all the constraints [of her era], is remembered as the greatest woman writer, who managed to be her unique and brilliant self. So whatever your obstacles, you can be unique and brilliant too.”

This isn’t the first time in recent memory that Austen-mania has gripped the lowlands of the pop-culture landscape. A little more than 10 years ago, the BBC production of “Pride and Prejudice,” starring smoldering Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth as Elizabeth and Darcy, and Amy Heckerling’s sparkly “Emma” update, “Clueless,” together precipitated a torrent of adaptations, including Gwyneth Paltrow as “Emma,” Ang Lee’s “Sense and Sensibility” and a mournful “Persuasion.” Helen Fielding published her genre-defining “Pride and Prejudice” riff, “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” in 1996. The cycle seemed sure to peter out after Patricia Rozema’s 1999 “Mansfield Park” and 2001′s “Bridget Jones” film — starring Colin Firth. But two years ago, it rebounded, with a heaving new Keira Knightley version of “Pride and Prejudice” and the Bollywood musical “Bride & Prejudice.”

“We can lay a lot of this at Colin Firth’s door, for good and for bad,” said Margaret C. Sullivan by phone. Sullivan is the author of “The Jane Austen Handbook,” the editor of Austenblog and a member of the Jane Austen Society of North America. “He’s pretty hot, let’s face it,” she continued, noting that membership in JASNA swelled after the 1995 “P&P” miniseries, and then declined again once hot-to-trot adherents realized that it was not the same thing as a Firth fan club. Indeed, in at least one of this summer’s Austen-inspired novels, “Austenland,” the heroine is besotted not by Austen’s writing, exactly, but by the star of the BBC miniseries.

In truth, Austen adoration is not a modern invention masterminded by Mr. Firth’s agent. Austen has been admired by critics, from Trollope to George Henry Lewes to F.R. Leavis to Lionel Trilling, very steadily for the past two centuries. Her work didn’t have to be reclaimed by feminist scholars in the ’70s, as it had never gone out of vogue. In addition to academic approbation, Austen has long attracted rowdier crowds of acolytes. The term “Janeite” was coined in 1894 in George Saintsbury’s preface to “Pride and Prejudice,” and Rudyard Kipling wrote a story called “The Janeites” in 1924, about World War I soldiers who get through the ugliness of trench warfare through their shared love of Austen’s novels. “You take it from me, Brethren, there’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place,” says one of the soldiers in the story. “Gawd bless ‘er, whoever she was.”

But this year’s wave of books and biopics is tinged with something different. Instead of acknowledging the enduring pleasures of Austen’s satire, or demonstrating how smoothly her centuries-old observations apply to contemporary society, this round of fanaticism is more interested in going back in time — or perhaps simply backward — to play dress-up in empire-waisted gowns with suitably dashing suitors to swoon over.

“Before, I think that [spinoff] books and movies were a little more tied to the novels, either as sequels or retellings,” said Sullivan. “Now we’re seeing a lot of chick lit in which women use Austen and her world as a fantasy escape.”

Sullivan’s own book, a glossary and guide to social customs of Regency England, features a cover illustration of a young woman in jeans looking in a mirror to see herself in empire-waisted splendor, but is not meant to be aspirational, she said. Instead, she hopes it will serve as a companion volume that helps readers understand the social cues and status symbols so crucial to Austen’s minute social critiques. “To me, the important thing is: Always go back to the novels,” said Sullivan. “The movies are fun, the books are fun, but you always have to go back to Jane.”

“Going back” is precisely the thing several of Sullivan’s fellow Janeites seem to be aiming for rather more literally. There are currently three novels about 21st century women, single and bummed about it, who travel back to 19th century England to meet the perfect man (i.e., Fitzwilliam Darcy, in case anyone’s still fuzzy on that).

In Laurie Viera Rigler’s “Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict,” heroine Courtney Stone falls asleep drunk in Los Angeles and wakes up in another woman’s bedchamber and another woman’s century. “Who are these people?” she wonders. “And what’s with those outfits?”

Alexandra Potter’s “Me and Mr. Darcy” is about bookstore manager Emily Albright, who, after a bad date that puts her over the edge, eschews a wet-T-shirty Mexico vacation with girlfriends in favor of a tour of Austen’s England with a busload of old ladies. Though Potter didn’t go in for all the fancy period-dress stuff, Emily does have a series of blackouts, dreams and possible stoned hallucinations in which she is wooed by Mr. D.

“Me and Mr. Darcy” offers a “Pride and Prejudice”-appropriate surprise. Graced with a gruesome chick-lit-by-numbers cover, it turns out to be one of the wittier of this summer’s offerings, not to mention sharp and sad in its observations about what spinsterhood, identity and aging look like for women in 2007. Potter, a 37-year-old Brit currently living in Los Angeles, acknowledged that fantasizing about Regency England is more than a little twisted. “The feminists didn’t fight this hard for us to be sitting around in corsets doing samplers, did they?” she said.

But, she added, “the fact is that everybody’s sick of modern-day men, and everybody’s guilty of looking for the perfect person, even if he’s a fantasy.” The Austen man, and Darcy in particular, she explained, “is going to love you forever. He’s not going to bump into some 20-year-old in a bar. He’s an honorable, chivalrous, upstanding man that is going to be a hard nut to crack, but once he falls in love with you, it’s going to be forever … He’s not going to be into Internet porn. And he doesn’t go for the prettiest girl in the room. He goes for Elizabeth Bennet, who is witty and sharp.”

Part of what makes Potter’s book unexpectedly charming is its, and her, understanding that, in fact, Darcy “doesn’t exist” and that if he did, he’d probably be a crashing bore. “If you dated Darcy in real life, he’d be a big disappointment,” she said. “‘Brooding’ equals ‘miserable,’ and Austen writes that he’s proud, which would actually mean incredibly sexist, and he’d be glowering and rude.”

In Shannon Hale’s “Austenland,” the author goes for broke, bypassing the dream sequence conceit in favor of full-bore fantasy immersion. Her heroine, Jane Hayes, attempts to quash her Firth obsession once and for all by vacationing at a Jane Austen theme park. No, it’s not one in which if you don’t marry a man of means by 25 you’re branded a spinster and forced to live off the kindness of family for the rest of your life! (Coming soon: Woolf-Wharton Water Park, where visitors wade into a stream with pockets full of rocks and can be swept down a river of laudanum! Wheee!)

No, Hale’s Austenland is simply a place where lonely, desperate women — unfulfilled by the romantic opportunities available in a post-feminist universe — can go to dress up in pretty clothes and play whist with handsome actors who simulate roguish grumpiness on command.

By phone, Hale said that she always loved Austen’s novels, but that “it wasn’t until I saw the BBC miniseries with Colin Firth that something changed and I fell completely in love with it — with him.” She added that she had friends who would watch the tapes twice in a Saturday “to the point where it was interfering with their normal relationships.”

I asked Hale, who is 33 and lives in Utah with her husband and children, but calls her book “an ode to my single self,” if she finds it odd that single women would fantasize about a period during which their freedoms were so limited. “It makes no sense at all,” she said. “It’s completely ironic and disturbing to me as a feminist that I still daydream about that era.”

Hale, who talked about her single 20s as a time in which she couldn’t even afford to purchase BBC videos, suggested that class fantasy plays a part in Austen fascination. “Especially for Americans, the idea of living in England, as part of the gentry, where you dress up in the morning and you have a maid do your hair and you put on a corset and there’s this leisure living … we fantasize about that!”

So … corsets and a rigid class system. All those regressive bindings we have managed to slough off, at least to some extent. Who wouldn’t want to live back then, anyway? (Also? No plumbing!) “It must speak to some more primal desire,” said Hale. “It must speak to something inside of us that we lack.”

Judging by the general tilt of this crop of Janeism, what Austen devotees seem to feel they lack is a man.

Even the movie “Becoming Jane,” which stars Anne Hathaway as a spunky, proto-feminist Austen, looks to imbue the author’s life, which to the best of our knowledge was man light, and certainly marriage free, with corset-straining ardor. The movie suggests that Austen’s brief (and minimally documented, in a handful of surviving letters sent from Jane to her sister Cassandra in 1795) flirtation with lawyer Tom LeFroy was actually the passionate inspiration for “Pride and Prejudice.”

Austen may have had love interests. She received at least one marriage proposal from a well-off family friend, which she accepted and then rejected the next morning. But the little surviving evidence does not suggest that her life was riddled with romantic assignations. It’s odd to stretch a passing acquaintance with LeFroy into a passionate dalliance, and to suggest, in the absence of proof, that Austen could not have made up a love story without a Darcy of her own on which to base it.

Among all those T-shirts available for sale, the most common are ones that brand wearers as “Mrs. Darcy, Mistress of Pemberley,” or “An Elizabeth in a Darcy-less World,” or “Property of Mr. Darcy.” One shirt is emblazoned with lines spoken by many of Austen’s male creations, including Darcy’s ejaculation, “You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”

In the mad dash to find their Darcys (and to invent one for their favorite author) some readers and fans have forgotten that Austen regarded mushy female infatuation as side-splittingly funny. Though she wrote in the Romantic period, and though her plots conform to those of classic romance, Austen’s work was not Romantic in style. Her heroines are not so much breathless and overcome by their emotions as they are practical and genuine. Elizabeth is never ga-ga over Darcy; when “Sense and Sensibility’s” Marianne Dashwood goes all nutsy for dashing Willoughby, she is punished for her rain-soaked silliness with a cold that nearly kills her. And Austen’s “Northanger Abbey” is a sendup of the popular Gothic novels with which her contemporaries were so obsessed.

Jan Fergus, professor of English at Lehigh University, said that readers seeking reassurance that soul mates are out there in Austen texts are missing part of the author’s point. “Even though Austen writes all these romance novels, it’s easy to imagine her characters living independently,” Fergus said. “So they’re missing the strength and independence and humor, which is in fact the only way you get through life. They’re missing the absolute hilarity at the swooning and obsession. All these women think they are connecting to Jane Austen and they’re actually channeling ["Emma's" goodhearted but painfully naive] Harriet Smith!”

Furthermore, were Austen not tickled by her besotted disciples, she might reasonably have been ticked.

Fergus described Austen’s work as being “about the impossibility of a woman finding a home for herself, by herself, and the importance of home for a woman.”

In Regency England, the search for Mr. Right may have taken place at candle-lit balls and in well-appointed drawing rooms, but it was not a game. As Austen wrote, “Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor.” Inheritance laws meant that women could not inherit from their fathers, and women lived in real fear of having their homes pulled out from under them if they did not secure a husband of means, who hopefully would not die overseas in the Army, a fate that Jane’s sister Cassandra’s fiancé suffered. Even if women did marry well, to a clergyman for instance, nothing was secure. Upon his retirement or death, his family would be turned out of their home, as happened to Austen’s father when he gave up his Hampshire parish. These are the threats and fears that drive Austen’s heroines.

One of the great pleasures of female life in the 21st century, especially if you’re of the class to which Austen belonged and into which she sunk her sharp teeth, is the possibility of earning your own living, of not having to land a man to survive financially, of no longer having to wear your need for a husband on your sleeve … or tote bag or bumper.

There is a particularly grim shirt for sale bearing an image of Austen originally drawn by her sister Cassandra (who also never married after the death of her fiancé) above the caption, “Where’s My Mr. Darcy?” To hold out for an affectionate union, as Austen did, was to put your future — and your family’s future — at real economic risk, with no greater (and perhaps a lesser) guarantee of finding your Mr. Darcy than today’s anxious singletons have. Fergus pointed out that Austen herself cautioned her niece in a letter that “there are such beings in the World perhaps, one in a Thousand, as the Creature You and I should think perfection. Where Grace & Spirit are united to Worth, where the Manners are equal to the Heart & Understanding, but such a person may not come in your way, or, if he does, he may not be the eldest son of a Man of Fortune, the Brother of your particular friend & belonging to your own Country.”

In short, Fergus said, “Austen is not expecting Darcy to turn up, and if he turns up, she knows he’s going to need a lot of reforming.”

But thinking about all of this is taxing. And not nearly as much fun as thinking about Colin Firth in dripping breeches.

By phone, Sullivan said the trick is finding balance. “You can go too far” in Austen fantasy, she said. “That’s one of the lessons of ‘Northanger Abbey’: that you can go too far with books, get far too lost in the fantasy. You need to keep things in perspective.”

“She was not much of a looker. Very, very plain,” Helen Trayler, the publisher’s managing director, told the Guardian. “Jane Austen wasn’t very good looking. She’s the most inspiring, readable author, but to put her on the cover wouldn’t be very inspiring at all. It’s just a bit off-putting.”

Publishers normally use a sketch of Austen drawn by her sister Cassandra. But in fairness to Wordsworth, the artist’s proto-Klee crooked-eye style and the subject’s hint of a scowl make it not the image Austen would be advised to use for her Match.com profile. Also, the book (“A Memoir of Jane Austen,” by James Austen-Leigh, a nephew) is being reissued to coincide with the release of a biopic called “Becoming Jane.” What, readers were expecting Anne Hathaway?

“I know you are not supposed to judge a book by its cover. Sadly people do. If you look more attractive, you just stand out more,” added Trayler. “Sadly, we do live in a very shallow world and people do judge by appearance.”

Sunday’s New York Times (where you can also see Austen “before” and “after”) tried to place the retouched portrait in a bigger picture. “What if, to put it bluntly, [Austen] became a writer in part because she didn’t have the looks to land a husband along the lines of a Mr. Darcy or a Mr. Knightley?” wonders Charles McGrath. The suggestion sounds mean and reductive, but it’s not entirely inconsistent with Austen’s time or, for that matter, her social commentary. (It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a good job must be in want of a pretty face.) Just one key fact-check: Austen was in fact engaged to a “big and awkward” man by the big and awkward name of Harris Bigg-Wither. She broke their betrothal after one day, apparently because she did not love him.

All in all, I find this whole thing more “is nothing sacred?” hilarious than I find it offensive, though I’m guessing no photo editor was ever told to plump the lips of Thomas Hardy.

Update: Due to an accidental deletion during the editing process, this post was originally published without the above sentences about Mr. Bigg and Awkward. That section has now been reinstated as originally written.

Yet critics love it. It’s heartwarming! It’s romantic! Roger Ebert’s heart leapt. Stephen Holden of the New York Times said, “It makes you believe in true love, the union of soul mates, happily-ever-after and all the other stuff a romantic comedy promises but so seldom delivers.” And audiences agree! One of my very best friends confessed to being so moved he stayed in his seat and wept for 20 minutes after the movie was over. And maybe that right there is how I can at least begin to explain what’s so wrong with it.

Jane Austen wasn’t trying to make you cry. Or believe in true love. Or soul mates. Or even in happily ever after. She was trying to make you laugh. To sit up and take notice of the staggering amount of human idiocy that surrounds you on a daily basis. To subvert the stilted and pat nature of all the weepy, sentimentalized 18th century novels that had come before her. And most important, to undercut and deflate at nearly every turn the idea — heck, the mere suggestion — of “romance” in all its most hackneyed forms.

There, I’ve said it. But I can see you don’t believe me. You’ve seen the commercials. The pre-dawn traipsing across the moors, the erotically messed-up hair, the lustiness of the country dancing. Clearly, this is a story about Love with a capital L — ungovernable, unregulated. The kind of passion — at least in movies — that can only be professed in the rain. And, of course, in this swirling, overwrought version of Austen’s classic tale — written by Deborah Moggach and directed by Joe Wright — it is. Professed in the rain, that is, as Elizabeth Bennet (Keira Knightley) and Mr. Darcy (Matthew MacFadyen) take refuge from a thunderstorm in the shadow of some imposing Masonic-temple-like structure that just happens to be conveniently located in the middle of the greenest and mistiest meadow this side of Hobbiton.

And this is where I get into trouble. Because if I stop here to point out that in the book, Mr. Darcy tells Elizabeth that he ardently admires and loves her within the confines of a snug drawing room, we start to enter crazed, Jane-ite spinster territory. Face it. If you are a single woman of a certain age, you can either be obsessed with Jane Austen or you can have cats. You cannot do both, and a long, long time ago I chose Jane. I haven’t just read the books and reread them. I’ve been to her house at Chawton. I’ve seen her grave at Winchester Cathedral (which, for the record, is the only time Jane Austen ever made me cry). I’ve even walked around Bath with a copy of “Persuasion” trying to figure out exactly where Anne Elliot is standing when she first catches sight of Capt. Wentworth on Milsom Street.

All of which renders me uniquely unqualified to have any sort of opinion on this movie. Because really … if the whole thing functions as a satisfying piece of entertainment, why quibble about such tiny little deviations from the book? The sentiments Darcy and Elizabeth express out there in the rain — while looking just as waterlogged as Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell at the end of “Four Weddings and a Funeral” — are essentially what Jane Austen wrote in the novel. And people like it! Which means they like Jane Austen. So what if it’s outside? Conventional Hollywood wisdom dictates that it’s usually better to open up these stilted drawing room productions for cinematic purposes. We get outside, we get a little fresh air. If we’re bored, we can look at the scenery. What’s the harm?

The harm is that trapping would-be lovers in a thunderstorm was already a horrifically trite and clichéd romantic convention circa 1796, when Jane Austen first began writing the novel that would become “Pride and Prejudice.” In fact, just such a rain-soaked encounter is one of the more famous scenes in Fanny Burney’s 1782 novel “Cecilia,” which Austen had certainly read, since its last chapter is the source of the phrase “pride and prejudice.” And of course it actually is raining in “Sense and Sensibility” when Marianne twists her ankle on a steep hill and has to be lifted up and carried home by the “uncommonly handsome” Mr. Willoughby.

My point is that Jane Austen understood these romantic conventions, how they worked on people, what they implied. If she’d wanted to go there, she could have. She chose not to. And that’s where the genius lies, in what the critic Terry Castle has called “the implacable anti-romanticism of her vision.” That’s what makes “Pride and Prejudice” endure — what makes it more than just your average, run-of-the-mill, bodice-ripping fairy tale about soul mates and true love conquering all. “Jane Austen kept to her compact,” Virginia Woolf once wrote. “She never trespassed beyond her boundaries. Never, even at the emotional age of fifteen, did she … obliterate a sarcasm in a spasm of compassion, or blur an outline in a mist of rhapsody. Spasms and rhapsodies, she seems to have said, pointing with her stick, end there; and the boundary line is perfectly distinct.”

The current film version, of course, captures none of this distinction. It’s all spasms and rhapsodies. But since it’s so “alive,” “whirling,” “voluptuous,” “intoxicating” and “delirious” no one seems to care that it’s not ….. well, it’s not exactly Jane Austen. (OK, no one except Anthony Lane, who took pains in his New Yorker review to highlight the many ways in which the filmmakers had “Brontëified” Austen past the point of recognition.) “Reader, I married him” is the first line of the last chapter of “Jane Eyre,” another 19th century novel whose basic plot echoes a Cinderella story. You know how the last chapter of “Pride and Prejudice” starts? “Happy for all her maternal feelings was the day on which Mrs. Bennet got rid of her two most deserving daughters.” And that is Austen in a nutshell: gloriously, resolutely unsentimental.

So go ahead — make a movie that affirms audiences’ faith in soul mates and happily ever after and moves grown men to tears. That’s fine. Just don’t call it Jane Austen.

If I were to do that, it wouldn’t be that I’d want her to leave her husband for me. The very idea of that seems preposterous. I’m not entirely clear what I would want by telling her I love her, but I think I just need for her to know that I have these incredible feelings. I want her to know that I am her friend, but also that I truly love her as a woman.

Writing it down has made it all seem so tawdry and just kind of pathetic, but here I am sitting with these same feelings, about to burst with the intensity of it all. I just wonder what she would say, how it would affect our relationship and if it even makes sense at all to do it.

I can envision a scenario where she looks at me shocked and concerned before politely telling me that we shouldn’t be friends anymore. Of course that would break my heart and I would regret having told her anything at all. I can also envision, though, an outcome where she looks at me and says something like, “You know, I love you too. We just can’t do anything about that except be friends.” I could definitely live with that and maybe the intensity of these feelings would lessen enough to be comfortable.

So, I guess mine is a two-part question. First, is it OK to remain friends with a married woman when you have these kinds of feelings for her, especially when I’m a married man? Second, does it make any sense to tell her, or should I just keep transmuting these feelings into an incredible friendship and hope for the best?

I should add that I love my wife very much and would never do anything to hurt her. I think there is some guilt on my conscience over the feelings I have for my friend, and this is not something I can talk with my wife about. I fear she would be terribly hurt, and rightly so. I just feel trapped by all this and sometimes wonder if I’m not just a bit crazy.

In Love With One Too Many Women

Dear In Love With One Too Many,

I think it may be OK to remain friends with her as long as you can act responsibly. With a bit of tact, you can handle this in a way that preserves your friendship but also gives you an opportunity to explore the issues your feelings give rise to.

I do not think there is anyone alive who does not wonder occasionally how life might have turned out if one or two things had been different. So why not approach this topic with your friend by wondering out loud … What if you had followed a different career path, or gone to a different company, for instance? How would life have turned out? What if you had never met your wife? Who would you have married? What would your ideal woman have been like? If it is not too bold, you might observe that your ideal woman might have been a lot like your co-worker. You might, in a playful mode, point out to her all the ways in which you and she are compatible. This could be taken more as a compliment than as an admission of love, and at the same time serve as an opening should there be feelings she wishes to discuss as well.

Having thus raised the topic, you might then ask her to consider the same question. Does she also wonder about alternative paths she might have taken? What if she had followed a different career path? What if she had never met her husband? Following this train of thought, still in a light and hypothetical way, you might then ask, What if you and she had met when you were younger, when neither of you was married — what does she think would have happened? Does she think that you might have been more than friends? Has she ever met a man, since she has been married, that she felt attracted to? If so, what did she do?

If raised with appropriate caution this can be an enjoyable thing to discuss. If she has had similar feelings, or even thoughts, she may welcome the opening. If not, she may not even realize what powerful feelings you are so delicately alluding to, and so you can avoid the pitfalls of confession.

By following this course of inquiry, you risk learning something that hurts you. She may, for instance, dismiss the idea that you and she could ever have been anything other than friends. If she does, at least you know not to pursue this line any further. It may never have occurred to her that things could be other than the way they are. You might then breathe a sigh of relief that you did not say more.

So proceed cautiously and listen carefully. Nothing can disrupt a friendship more than the sudden knowledge that one person has so little understanding of the other as to think that you could be anything other than friends. And if, after giving evidence that she has no such feelings, she asks you if you feel this way: Deny, deny, deny! For what would the point be of telling her how strong your feelings are, if they cannot be acted on? Better to let them be there and preserve the friendship.

Finally, though it may be small consolation, remember the words of Jane Austen: “Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.”

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