If the creative process were merely the recycling of one's own life experiences, down to snippets of dialogue, there'd be a lot more great novels in the world than there are.

That being said, the parallel with Austen's fiction that dominates Becoming Jane is not the Elizabeth-Darcy romance but the relationship between Marianne Dashwood and Willoughby. A clever, perceptive and irresponsible young man charms an intelligent, strong minded and somewhat unconventional young woman by appealing to her intellect and her sense that she is superior to those around her. After leading her on and raising her expectations, he drops her because he must marry for money and she has none. Having done so, he reproaches himself, but the consequences for her are a good deal worse than for him. The movie makes Lefroy less of a cad than Willoughby and Austen less of a deceived victim than Marianne, but he skates and she is stuck.

Courtship in Austen is a blood sport, in which mistakes and failures have disastrous lifelong consequences. The aborted courtship in Becoming Jane is fiction, but it is a fiction consistent with Austen's eventual situation as a mordantly perceptive spinster commentator on the marriage market, whose happy endings sugar coat by no means sympathetic observations on the process.

The movie itself sugar coats Austen's career to suit modern concepts of female independence. She did not manage to live on her writings, earning a total of about 700 pounds, but remained dependent on her brothers for support from her father's death in 1806 until her own.