Anyone likely to be watching “Becoming Jane,” Julian Jarrold’s attempt to imagine a historical love affair between a young Jane Austen and an impecunious Irish lawyer in 1795, is likely to know in advance how it comes out. Though he’s got a lot of nerve, Mr. Jarrold hasn’t got quite enough to make one of the world’s most famous spinsters into a happily married lady.

The suspense lies in our waiting to see not if, but how the lovers will be parted. In this respect, if in no other, all honor to Mr. Jarrold and his screenwriters, Sarah Williams and Kevin Hood, for giving us an ending that, for its high moral tone and sense of duty, Jane Austen would have been pleased with.

Otherwise, the movie is a load of sentimental rubbish.

From one of the real Austen’s letters, we know that she met “a gentlemanlike, good-looking pleasant young man” named Tom Lefroy around Christmastime,1795,when she had just turned 20. She danced with him at three Christmas balls and probably flirted with him. She seems never to have seen him again. Everything else in “Becoming Jane” is made up.

And it is made up in particularly unbelievable ways. Austen (Anne Hathaway) boldly strides forward to bat in a men’s cricket match, scores several runs, and afterward rushes down to the river to see the men bathing naked. She attends a boxing match and otherwise behaves as no respectable lady, let alone a moralist such as Jane Austen, would have done in 1795.

These are not minor liberties, but evidence of a basic failure to understand the history ostensibly being presented. The problem with the film is basically the same as it was with the most recent movie adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice” — whose plot “Becoming Jane” sticks close to as a way of suggesting that that novel might have been autobiographical. That is, it imposes 21st-century standards on an 18th-century story and so makes nonsense of it. Both movies propose that sexual “repression” is the key to understanding their heroes and the society in which they live.

In “Becoming Jane,” Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy) becomes attractive to Jane because of his reputation as a rake. She is supposedly hungry for the “experience” of the world that her repressive society has denied her. She wants to write fiction, but Tom points out to her that she has to have more of this precious “experience” — which is obviously a code word for sex — before she can write it.

Accordingly, he presents her with a copy of Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones” as if it were the “Kama Sutra” — a forbidden book that the repressors-in-chief would have been scandalized to know she was reading. Not only is this idea of “experience” — and in particular sexual experience — as the foundation of art highly dubious in itself, not only would it have been unknown in England during the Napoleonic era, but it makes no sense without the myth of “Victorianism” — historically two generations later in any case — as we have retrospectively imagined it.

In fact, it is most unlikely that even the Victorians were ever shocked by the idea of the act of sex. Austen would certainly have read “Tom Jones” without having been told about it by her hopeful lover or anyone thinking it particularly daring for her to have done so. And the idea of her having been titillated, as she is in the film, by Tom’s reading to her an account of swallows mating from a book of natural history, is ridiculous. Like most people in the 18th century, Austen lived close enough to nature to have been thoroughly familiar with the sexual behavior of animals.

This is so obvious that we are forced to conclude that “Becoming Jane” has made not the slightest attempt to imagine itself back into Jane Austen’s time. Instead, it drags her into ours and so makes her unlike how we know she was. The people in Jane Austen’s time simply didn’t go around thinking that all they needed was to loosen up sexually and allow women more freedom to choose their own destinies. Certainly Jane Austen didn’t.

The beliefs about sex and families and money that people held in Austen’s time may have been benighted, but they really did hold them. Not to give Austen’s contemporaries credit for this, but instead to treat them as if they were children who simply didn’t know any better — as if they could have been put right by any prematurely “experienced” high school girl of today—is worse than philistinism. It is an act of historical vandalism.

jbowman@nysun.com