One of my closest friends loves these kinds of movies, so I went to see it with her. I’ve read almost everything in life I ever encountered, and did not develop a taste for this slow moving British literature, whatever century it was from.
And then that AWFUL ending. I always want to re-write Romeo and Juliet, let them slip away to Spain or France and have a wonderful life and great children. I loved Jane in many ways – the movie and the character. But letting go of Tom for those altruistic reasons – ugh.
I woke up in the middle of the night understanding why I have such a visceral reaction to these stories – it’s the paradigm shift! Jane believed in the world she lived in: of lack, restriction and restraint. Tom, because he was raised in Ireland, had experienced a more open life, but had not really known what to do with it except be outrageous, at least outwardly.
If they had escaped to Scotland to be married, and then gone to Ireland, the Irish honoring of the bards among us would likely have resulted in easy success for Jane’s writing. And seeing positive results rather than reinforcing those painful restrictions would have allowed Tom and Jane to work from an opportunity standpoint, rather than a suffering standpoint.
In other words, Jane got what she saw she could get and was content with that. What if she had seen another set of possibilities? We’d have had the happy ending that I crave – and know is possible.