thrilled: Anne Hathaway

Anne Hathaway, the 24-year-old Hollywood star unexpectedly picked to play Jane Austen in a £9 million film, revealed on Sunday that she prepared for the part by reading every one of Austen's letters in the British Library.

Hathaway was so desperate to get under the skin of the novelist, whom she said she has worshipped since she was 14, that while in England she ordered a copy of Austen's 18th-century writing desk, some quill pens and parchment, so that she could write to family and friends in America while imagining herself to be Austen.

Hathaway was the absent star of honour at the gala premiere in Leicester Square, London, on Sunday night of Becoming Jane, a British film about a little-known romance Jane Austen had in 1795 when she was 20 with a dashing Irish lawyer, Tom Lafroy, played in the film by James McAvoy.

But the raven-haired actress, born in Brooklyn, told The Daily Telegraph from Vancouver, where she is completing her next film, Passengers, that she had come to England for a month — before the film was shot in Ireland — to have voice coaching to perfect Austen's accent.

She said: “I went to the British Library most days each week — I still have my pass — to read her letters. To be with the same pieces of paper that she had sat in front of was a thrill that I just can't describe.”

Hathaway has recently come of age as a major Hollywood star after major roles in Brokeback Mountain and the acerbic comedy, The Devil Wears Prada. She joins a list of Americans — Renee Zellweger as Beatrix Potter and Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf — playing British literary lionesses on screen.

Asked recently whether she thought she could successfully portray Austen, who left a reputation as a somewhat acerbic Home Counties spinster, Hathaway said: “I’ve never been too pretty for anything.”

As an Austen fanatic — she studied her while taking an English degree at Vassar university — Hathaway also revealed that having thought that she had failed her first audition for the film, she had “begged, begged, begged” for a second. She was given another and won the part.