Anne Hathaway stars as the young Jane Austen, with prolific young British star James McAvoy donning the regency breeches to play her love interest.

Yes, love interest. The author may have died a spinster at the age of 41, but one biographer believes he's found evidence that when she was 20 years old, she fell head over heels for a roguish young gentleman called Tom Lefroy.

'Becoming Jane' takes this idea and runs with it, suggesting that a ride on the crazy highway of romance could have transformed our heroine from childish writer to literary genius…

There's an obvious question at the heart of the life of Jane Austen: how someone who lived a relatively brief, uneventful life could have gained such extraordinary and enduring insights into human nature.

Despite the best efforts of an elegantly-staged film, that isn't a mystery on which 'Becoming Jane' throws a great deal of light.

The key performances are well-judged, credible and appealing - Anne Hathaway is charming and beautiful, James McAvoy as accomplished as I've come to expect, and Julie Walters very likeable. But the attempt to take the author's life story and impose on it the concerns and style of her fiction doesn't do a huge service to either.

The result is a film which feels as though it might have been based on sub-Jane Austen source material, with the wit and illumination of the novelist's work largely absent.

It's competently made in every department, but while watching it I couldn't help thinking that an adaptation of even a relatively minor Jane Austen work such as 'Northanger Abbey' would have provided rather more insight into the author and the times in which she lived.