The 2007 movie Becoming Jane stars Anne Hathaway as author Jane Austen. The movie details her life; more specifically the movie explores her relationship with Tom Lefroy. The movie depicts how Jane and Tom meet and how a romance develops, resulting in Tom purposing marriage and Jane accepting. Tom’s family, however, does not approve of Jane because she is penniless. Tom too comes from a poor family and must marry for money. The two eventually decide to elope to Greta Green but Jane decides she can not do this because Tom’s family depends on him too much. At the end the movie flashes ahead some fifteen years and here Jane and Tom meet again. They are friendly towards one another and Jane meets Tom’s daughter, who is also named Jane. Jane agrees to read a passage from one of her novels for Tom’s daughter and the movie ends. As Jane Austen never married, one has to wonder how much of the relationship between Jane and Tom shown in the movie is real.
There is much debate as to the actual relationship between the two. The two did meet while Tom was visiting family, nearby neighbors and friends of the Austen family. During this time she formed a friendship with Tom; she found him very agreeable and enjoyed his company. Much of the debate about Jane’s relationship with Tom stems from the three surviving letters to her sister Cassandra (Jane’s sister burned many of the letters Jane wrote to her) in which she expressly mentions Tom.
There seem to be two opinions stemming from the brief mention of Tom in the three letters. One opinion is that Tom and Jane simply had a good and flirtatious time and that there was nothing serious between the two. The other opinion is that Jane was deeply in love with Tom and those feelings are returned. Jane writes to her sister of she and Tom dancing and flirting and in the last letter writes that she will miss Tom greatly when he leaves, which he was near to doing when she wrote the letter, in the same letter she tells her sister she is crying over thoughts of him leaving even as she writes. There is some speculation that Tom’s daughter Jane is named after Jane Austen, which would lend to the theory that they were deeply in love. Tom’s mother-in-law was named Jane as well, so we can never really know if he did indeed name her after Austen.
The three letters really do not reveal much about the relationship between the two. I can see how they could be interpreted both ways. However, Tom is not the only man with which Jane has been rumored to be in love with. Jane is also rumored to have been in love with a sea captain who died before they could be married. Jane was engaged once very very briefly to the brother of some friends, she broke the engagement because their tempers did not suit. There are some who think Austen scholars and fans search for love connections where there are none; because they want Jane to have the love she gave her characters.
Jane died in July 1817 without ever marrying.
Jane Austen Bio This link details the life of Jane Austen
Becoming Jane ... This link talks about the movie
The Love Life of Jane The article here discusses the love life of Jane Austen
What Becoming Jane Got Wrong Details what about Jane's love life the movie got wrong