Austen's look back at what might have been

As part of its "Complete Jane Austen" series, coming to you via the venerable "Masterpiece Theater" -- or "Masterpiece," as it seems to be less called now -- PBS is airing "Miss Austen Regrets," a BBC-sprung biopic with a title that references Cole Porter. The rest of it is more historically apt. And as these things go, it is excellent, due in no small part to a thoroughly imagined performance by Olivia Williams.

Because she wrote about her time and the places she knew, an Austen biopic can happily look just like an adaptation of one of her books. (This one, directed by Jeremy Lovering, designed by Melanie Allen and photographed by David Katznelson, looks very good.)

It allows for the same atmosphere and activities -- the country lanes, the walks, the visits, the empire waists, raging passion channeled into polite conversation -- and has as its center a woman with a sharp wit and a lively spirit. (Think Lizzie Bennett with a pinch of Elinor Dashwood, here on the verge of 40.)

The difference is that the author's own life took another course from that of her heroines: She never married. And she wrote books.

This is the second recent movie about Austen, after last year's theatrical release "Becoming Jane," a thing of wild invention that packed her off on an aborted elopement to Scotland. Like that film, "Miss Austen Regrets" ruminates on the author's love life, or lack thereof -- tries to rectify it, in a way, by painting her as a creature of inner passion. But while screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes (the excellent kidnapping miniseries "Five Days") has drawn some serious curlicues around the few available facts -- and she has definitely done her homework -- she has also managed to create plausible characters and crises.

Like most biographical films, it lacks plot, but by focusing on just the last couple of years of her life, Hughes has time to open up individual scenes and investigate ideas and inner flames rather than merely staging a pageant of great moments.

To Austen's usual concerns of the interplay of love and money, Hughes adds the question of art and whether it might be worth sacrificing the first two for the third. "You have something much more powerful and much more desirable than experience," Jane is told by a young doctor for whom she conceives what would have been then considered, as now, an age-inappropriate liking. "You have imagination." Later, a French maid says something of the same kind.