There is something subversive going on in The Jane Austen Book Club, though you have to be willing to poke fun of your own reading habits in order to see it. On the surface another ensemble relationship drama centered on the lives of a group of women friends, the picture also reveals how most of us turn the reading of a novel – or the watching of a movie, for that matter – into a narcissistic exercise. As the women of this particular club – including a recent divorcee (Amy Brenneman), a young married schoolteacher (Emily Blunt) and a commitment-phobe dog breeder (Maria Bello), among others – work their way through Austen’s novels, they each obsessively evaluate the stories based on how they reflect upon their own lives. Naturally, the book each woman finds most “sympathetic” to her own situation is the one she likes the best.
