“When you have the privilege of following a character to old age, it sort of reflects that. “Life: it’s a constant quest and constant exploration,” she says. Husson compares this trajectory through ages to watching a biopic, albeit of someone imaginary. Jane has, in fact, suffered terrible loss. Is that true? French director Eva Husson’s film – based on the 2016 prize-winning novel by Graham Swift and adapted by Normal People’s Alice Birch – is set in 1925, when Jane is 24, but she flashes forward to show us Jane’s life in early middle age and as an old woman (played by Glenda Jackson), now a successful writer recalling her sensuous youth. To have been “so comprehensively bereaved” at the very beginning of life, her mistress continues, means that loss – real loss – is over and done with.
Jane – played by Australian actress Odessa Young – was left as a baby on the steps of an orphanage. Be glad you have no parents, the patrician Mrs Niven instructs her maid, Jane, as she strips the jewellery from her hands. It is the day before Mothering Sunday, when servants in big houses are given the day off to visit their mothers.
