The release of Bright Star has brought critical acclaim for Jane Campion after a five-year hiatus from feature films and the poor reception for her underrated thriller In the Cut (2004). Campion’s return to the spotlight, almost two decades since her best work in An Angel at My Table (1990) and The Piano (1993), may be enough reason for cineastes to celebrate, but her biopic about the tragic romance between John Keats and Fanny Brawne gives poetry lovers cause for joy as well, igniting popular interest in a literary legend that has had little cultural capital outside of university English departments.
Adaptations of classic British novels and plays abound, and the occasional break-through biopic about the authors themselves has focused attention on English writers like William Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf with Shakespeare in Love (1998) and The Hours (2002). Smaller films have dramatized the lives of Stevie Smith in Stevie (1978), D. H. Lawrence in Priest of Love (1981), T.S. Eliot in Tom and Viv (1994), Iris Murdock in Iris (2001), Beatrix Potter in Miss Potter (2006), Irish novelist James Joyce in Nora (2000), and Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in The Edge of Love (2008).
The English Romantics have been represented in this filmography too, though with a surprisingly small number of films, given the significance of these writers to British letters and the scandal-filled lives lead by some. Perhaps only fans of classic horror will recall the first appearance on screen of Lord Byron and the Shelleys––Percy and Mary––in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935). In the frame story to this sequel, the elegant Mary (played by Elsa Lanchester, who also has the more memorable role as the monster’s bride), continues her tale for the well-mannered Byron and husband Shelley. (Of course, the story this “Mary Shelley” narrates is not the one known to readers of the novel but rather an Americanized version of Peggy Webling’s 1927 play, adapted from the original.)
Ken Russell, well-known for his lack of cinematic restraint, returned to this scene in his 1986 film, Gothic, now set with some historical accuracy in 1816 at Lord Byron’s Swiss villa––with Gabriel Byrne as Byron, Natasha Richardson as Mary Godwin, and Julian Sands as Shelley. Byron’s personal physician, John Polidori, and Mary’s half-sister, Claire, join the three for a night of personal confessions, drug-induced hallucinations, and an orgy of sexual couplings––which, we are encouraged to infer, inspired both Mary’s Frankenstein and Polidori’s short story “The Vampyre.”
Until recently the most accomplished of the Romantic biopics has been Pandaemonium (2000), directed by Julien Temple (better known for concert documentaries like the 2006 Glastonbury), about the friendship between first-generation Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge. Filling out the cast of characters are William’s sister, Dorothy; his wife, Mary; Coleridge’s wife, Sara Fricker; Robert Southey, poet laureate before Wordsworth; Tom Poole, Coleridge’s tradesman supporter; and even a brief appearance by Lord Byron. For demanding historians, the absence of Sara Hutchinson and Annette Vallon may be a problem, but to include them would have over-burdened an already complex story of friendship, betrayal, political intrigue and, most importantly, creativity. The film’s sympathies quite clearly lie with Coleridge, whose mental anguish and laudanum addiction, are much easier to dramatize than Wordsworth’s reserve. But, for me, the scenes set near Nether Stowey in Somerset depicting the inspiration for “Frost at Midnight,” “Kubla Khan,” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” along with the interior imaginings of their compositions are the high points of the film––nothing stuffy here, just pure cinema.
Now I come to the most recent and best known of the Romantic biopics––and the one that may have the most similarities to Bright Star––Julian Jarrold’s 2007 portrait of a young Jane Austen, Becoming Jane. Like the Keats biopic, this one too is based on a recently published biography that sets up the romance between twenty-year-old Jane and Tom Lefroy, played by Anne Hathaway and James McAvoy respectively. The course of that relationship as well as the unhappy end to her sister’s engagement inspires the great novels to follow: appropriately enough, we see and hear the young writer compose the opening lines of First Impressions (what would become Pride and Prejudice) and read from the published text of the work in the final scene. Denied her own marital happiness, Jane says of the works to come, “My characters will have, after a little bit of trouble, all that they desire.”
In like manner, John Keats––belittled by contemporary critics for his class origins and dogged by poverty, illness, and death––found little happiness. His anguish for what he called his “posthumous life” was only intensified by the belief that he had been given too little time to secure his place among the great English poets. Succeeding generations, of course, have proven him wrong. Of the romance that may have inspired his great odes, the historical Fanny was mute, Keats having burned her letters and Fanny having kept the youthful engagement a secret from her husband and children until shortly before her death four decades later. Still, as several reviewers have noted, the story of Bright Star is more Brawne’s than Keats’s; and for that focus, acknowledges Campion in the film’s press book, she “needed to invent the story between the facts.” That, of course, is what most screenwriters do with the biographical evidence available to them, but the results are not always as luminous as they are in films like Pandaemonium and Bright Star––to borrow Coleridge’s description for the creative imagination, these “miracle[s] of rare device.”