The Itch for Acting
By Ian Butcher
Jane Austen’s love of theatricals
In this 250th year since the birth of Jane Austen, to paraphrase the opening lines of her Pride and Prejudice, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single writer in possession of a good writing style should be in want of theatricals[1]. Although Austen is almost exclusively known for her novels, she was a regular theatregoer, wrote juvenile plays, read plays, acted in family theatricals and read plays aloud with her family. Her novels are very theatrical in conception with characters often dramatically entering and leaving through various doors, comic misunderstandings, dramatic dialogue and ‘set-piece’ chapters which are analogous to stage scenes. Her work has been widely adapted for stage and screen. Her love of theatre and theatricals permeated much of her work and her letters.
Early Theatricals
Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 in the small village of Steventon, Hampshire, the daughter of a clergyman. She was one of eight children, six boys and two girls. The house was a busy one as her father took in boy pupils as boarders at his school. The household was relatively well-off with maids and manservants. Jane and her sister were sent to boarding school in Oxford, then Southampton, but were sent home after catching typhus, from which Jane nearly died. They were sent briefly to the Reading Abbey Girls’ School where the curriculum probably included French, spelling, needlework, dancing, music and drama. After 1786 the girls were home educated. Jane’s primary education came mainly from access to the extensive library of her father and that of a family friend. She became a voracious reader.
Private theatricals were very fashionable in middle-class and gentrified society from the 1770s. Theatre was an essential part of fashionable middle-class life. Some aristocrats even built elaborate home theatres. Theatricals first came to Steventon when Jane was about seven. Comedies were favoured over tragedies, thus stimulating Austen’s life-long love of comedic writing and the wish to incite laughter. The dining-parlour was used for performances, but also their barn which was fitted up as a makeshift theatre. It is known that Matilda (Francklin) was performed, as were Garrick’s Bon Ton and The Rivals by Sheridan, when Jane was young. Sheridan was to become a favourite and an influence on Jane’s work, as well as her well-documented love of Shakespeare. The Tragedy of Tom Thumb based on Henry Fielding’s work was also performed in Steventon in 1788. Her brother James wrote prologues and epilogues to these plays.
The reading of plays after dinner was also a favourite pastime of the Austen family. Being proficient at reading aloud was considered an important social skill when reading to friends and family was common. According to Austen’s niece’s diary (Fanny Knight), Jane took part in unrehearsed play readings and always read out enthusiastically. Her other niece (Caroline) wrote that Jane took up “a volume of Eveline and read a few pages of Mr Smith and the Brangtons and I thought that it was like a play. She had a very good speaking voice“ (janeausteninfo). Her brother Henry concurs “She read aloud with very great taste and effect” (Byrne 2).
Fanny Price’s poor opinion of Henry Crawford softens when she hears him declaim Shakespeare in Mansfield Park. She declares that “It was truly dramatic. – His acting had first taught Fanny what pleasure a play might give, and his reading brought all his acting before her again”. Edmund comments “to read well aloud, is no everyday talent”. Lady Bertram agrees that “It was really like being at a play…You have a great turn for acting…I think you will have a theatre, some time or other, at your house in Norfolk” (Mansfield Park 312-313).
Between the ages of eleven and seventeen, Jane wrote a series of stories, sketches and fragments to entertain the family. These were often about girls behaving badly, eating too much, getting drunk, greedy self-seeking women, getting into fights and stealing other girls’ boyfriends. These survive in juvenilia notebooks entitled Volume the First, Volume the Second and Volume the Third. Jane began to write her own burlesque playlets, probably performed as afterpieces to the main play. Jane wrote and participated in one such playlet called The Mystery (1788). Other creations include The Visit, The First Act of a Comedy, The Three Sisters, Love and Freindship (sic) and Sir Charles Grandison, a five-act adaptation based on the monumental Richardson novel Sir Charles Grandison. These playlets often featured parodies of dull social visits, the pomposity of dinner etiquette, and sudden marriage proposals which were accepted unhesitatingly.
The family’s enthusiasm for theatre was enhanced when their exotic, French-speaking cousin, Eliza de Feuillide, a countess (due to her husband dubiously styling himself “compte”), came to stay and regaled them with tales of private theatricals in France. It has been said that the flirtatious and vivacious Eliza with her talent for the stage was Jane’s model for Mary Crawford of Mansfield Park. Eliza’s husband had been guillotined in the French Revolution, hence her coming to England. Eliza ultimately married Jane’s brother, Henry Thomas Austen, in 1794. Eliza often took the lead roles in Austen family theatricals. She died in 1813 with Jane at her bedside.
After her father’s death in 1805, Jane and her sister Cassandra stayed at Godmersham, the home of their brother, Edward Austen Knight. Here the girls performed plays written by each other, aided by Edward’s children’s governess, Anne Sharp, who frequently played the male roles. Jane was said to frequently repeat lines from these plays in her daily life and letters. These theatricals dwindled somewhat after performances of The Sultan and The High Life when Jane’s brother abandoned theatricals to focus on the production of a weekly magazine, The Loiterer, which also proved influential on Jane’s early writings. However, Jane is known to have acted the role of Mrs Candour in Sheridan’s School for Scandal later when she was thirty-five. An ideal role for Jane as Mrs Candour comments on friends’ failings with “sugar-coated ferocity” (Byrne).
Theatregoer Jane
In 1801 when Jane was twenty-five, the family moved to Bath when her father retired and her brother James inherited the rectory and the living at Steventon. Bath was a major social centre in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, though its heyday had passed. Jane found the move shocking and turbulent, but ultimately a significant inspiration for her novels. She actually wrote very little during this time, possibly due to her unhappiness and the demands of a social life. While the Austen family’s financial situation was modest, it was here, during those five years, that she attended concerts and balls. She loved dancing. She also was a keen theatregoer, sometimes attending productions several times a week. This continued when in London – in 1814 arranging the publication of Mansfield Park – and Southampton. Lovers’ Vows – featured in Mansfield Park – was performed at least fifteen times in Bath when Austen was there and made an obvious impression on her. Gay acknowledges Austen’s “lively interest as a novelist in theatrical modes of behaviour” (Gay ix). Byrne concurs, pointing to Austen’s “systematic incorporation of quasi-theatrical techniques into her mature novels” (Byrne 71).
This was largely due to the provisions of the 1737 Licensing Act which stipulated that only “patented” theatres could put on “spoken word” plays. The most common types of productions were “burlettes” which were short and comic operas and musicals. This was largely due to the provisions of the 1737 Licensing Act which stipulated that only allowed “patented” theatres could put on “spoken word” plays. Every play that was to be put on had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain for approval under threat of considerable penalties for any person failing these conditions. Before 1843, when the Act was modified, patented theatres in London included the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. The Theatre Royal in Bath was also a patented theatre, probably to the delight of Jane, and the only provincial theatre to gain such status.
Successful actors were celebrities, and Austen followed such players as Robert Elliston and Edmund Kean. Jane took her nieces to see Kean in his famous performance of Shylock. Jane’s letters are full of gossip about her theatregoing, performances and favourite actors. The names of Crawford and Yates in Mansfield Park were also names of famous leading actors [Richard and Mary Ann Yates and Mrs Ann Crawford] of the eighteenth-century stage. The reference would not have been lost on Austen’s readers. Austen would have been very aware of the British class system in public theatres became in that the higher classes sat in boxes, the lower classes and the critics in the pit and the middle-classes in the middle balconies.
Mansfield Park
In an era where decorum and courting rules of the time prevented private conversations, handholding or any type of physical contact between unmarried ladies and gentlemen without a chaperone present, dancing and theatricals allowed young people to indulge in more intimate behaviour under the guise of playing someone else. Austen already prepares the ground before any performance is envisaged by showing some palpable flirting between some of the characters during the excursion of the young people to Sotherton. This flirtatious behaviour is amplified during the play rehearsals.
Six chapters of Austen’s 1814 novel Mansfield Park are devoted to the discussion and rehearsals for a private theatrical production of Elizabeth Inchbald’s Lovers’ Vows, itself an expurgated version of August Kotzbue’s Das Kind der Liebe. It is the most extensive treatment of a private theatrical in Austen’s work, as only tangential references are made to theatre in other works, although the forum of public theatres forms the backdrop for plot developments in several novels. Anticlimactically, there is no actual performance of the play in Mansfield Park as the owner of the house returns from his sugar plantation in Antigua and is shocked to find his rooms turned into a theatre by the young people with a carpenter-built stage and theatre curtain. Rehearsals immediately stop. In times when monied people had limited distractions to alleviate their boredom, Lady Bertram regrets that the play has been stopped and enthuses that “we have all been alive with acting”. Elsewhere the “itch for acting” is described as an “infection” (Mansfield Park 113,168,171).
In the novel, the heroine, Fanny Price, and her cousin, Edmund, disapprove of mounting a play – calling it “highly injudicious” – while the house’s owner, Sir Thomas, is absent. As Fanny and Edmund are generally portrayed as the most honest of the cast of characters, it has been interpreted that Austen therefore disapproved of theatricals. This is patently not the case. The two object to the content of the play which is about a fallen woman, an illegitimate child, and the difficulties of prohibited relationships from a woman’s perspective. In fact, Austen uses the rehearsals for the play to reveal her characters’ real personalities and sets up the action for the rest of the novel. So, we are observing Austen’s characters in a novel act out a play where they have the opportunity to be someone else for a short while. Austen is using theatrical metaphors of part-playing and role-learning to show human deceit and self-deception laid bare by the play. There is a pairing between the novel’s characters and the play’s characters, Austen inter-weaving the counter-text of the play with the plot of the novel. The sub-plot of Lovers’ Vows parallels the main plot in the novel, the prohibited love between heroine and the clergyman/mentor, and the romantic intimacies between Edmund/|Mary and Henry/Maria. The characters argue lengthily about the suitability of which play to perform and who should play which roles, often vainly pushing themselves forward and denigrating the other potential actors’ aptitudes for specific roles. Mary Crawford, for example, reveals herself to be a shallow actress who only cares for herself, her brother and getting ahead in the world: this comes out as true later in the book. Henry Crawford profits from his interest in flirting with Maria Bertram by continually rehearsing the scene where Maria is required to keep “her hand pressed to Henry Crawford’s heart” (Mansfield Park 169). Maria and Henry finally elope, even though Maria is married to the boring Mr Rushworth. Her sister, Julia, elopes with another of the actors in the play, Mr Yates, thus ruining both the sisters’ reputations.
Fanny declines to participate in the play saying that “I really cannot act” (Mansfield Park 136). Fanny is using “act” in a double meaning in that she cannot dissemble and ‘put on an act’ as the others are willing to do. Austen consistently uses the words “act” and “acting” to blur the distinction between play-acting and the quasi-theatrical role-playing of social conduct. Fanny’s jealousy of Mary – her dazzling rival – also drives much of the novel. Edmund closely resembles his role, Anhalt, in character and situation, as he finds himself expressing his own feelings while “making love” to Mary. There are also very close parallels between Sir Thomas Bertram and the play’s character Baron Wildenhaim.
Austen’s scenes are ‘dramatic’ in that they were often conceived and conducted in stage terms. The dialogue is dramatic, often without the novelistic “he said”, “she replied”, allowing the dialogue to flow naturally. Austen uses what is called a “free indirect style” (free indirect discourse) which allows Austen to blend the character’s private thoughts and inner narrative, blurring the divide between character and narrator while maintaining the authority of a third-person narrative, forming an immediate, intimate yet distanced and objective perspective. The narrator’s strongly judgmental and opinionated views result in more penetrating psychological depth of character than realised in earlier fiction. In the case of Fanny Price, for example, the psychology of jealousy, guilt and anxiety. The technique allows Austen to highlight disparities between what the characters think, say and do.
Characters are often entering and exiting as if on stage, often leaving at the end of a “scene” to allow others to enter for the next “scene”. Upon hearing Sir Thomas approach, Fanny “rushed out of an opposite door from the one her uncle was approaching” (Mansfield Park 278). At the critical moment when Sir Thomas returns to interrupt the rehearsal, he goes to his “own dear room” and billiard room only to find that they have been turned into part of the theatre with “candles burning…and a general air of confusion in the furniture”. He finally comes face to face “on the stage of a theatre, and opposed to a ranting young man” (Yates) in a comic encounter bringing the worlds of the theatre and the harsh reality of Sir Thomas together, and to a close to the theatricals (Mansfield Park 169-170). Austen also provides ‘stage directions’ for her characters “(fondling her)” rather than describing actions in a novelistic way (Mansfield Park 359).
Austen even enters into a significant eighteenth-century theatrical debate about acting styles through Mr Yates and Henry Crawford. There was a shift in contemporary theatres away from the oratorical and declamatory style towards a more naturalistic and emotionally nuanced, expressive approach. Mr Yates in Mansfield Park represents the “old” style of grand gestures and powerful delivery traditionally used by tragedians, whereas Henry Crawford represents the more modern low-key, truthful style. Austen appears to take sides in that Yates style is described as “rants”, “starts” and “storming”; Mr Yates “was in general thought to rant dreadfully”. Yates judges Henry’s style as “tameness and insipidity”. Fanny remarks that Henry “acted well”, was “the best actor of all”, having “more talent and taste than Mr Yates” (Mansfield Park 152-157). Fanny’s favourable impression is confirmed later when Henry reads aloud some Shakespeare speeches with great aplomb and entrances his audience.
Austen is interested in the discrepancy between high-born and lower types and their social mobility. Many of her female characters elevate themselves in the traditional way by marrying “up” to rich men. The prime example might be Elizabeth Bennet who marries the aristocrat Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, but only after refusing his initial proposal and then agreeing on her own terms of love and mutual respect. Gay writes that Austen was convinced of
“the pervasive theatricality of contemporary genteel society…Austen is a proto-feminist who subverts the eighteenth-century cultural construct in which the middle and upper-class female is the performer, publicly displaying her accomplishments for the male observer, a necessary enactment in order to win a husband and thus a life-wage” (Gay 91).
Slavery
One of the subtle background motifs of Mansfield Park is the theme of slavery. The house itself is built on the profits from Sir Thomas Bertram’s sugar plantation in Antigua, a British colony in the West Indies and is the key source of the Bertram family’s wealth. All the characters in the novel – including Fanny – have a relatively easy life based on slave trade money. Sir Thomas and his son Tom go to Antigua in 1806 and Tom comes back a year later, while Sir Thomas stays on until October 1808. Sugar plantations in the Caribbean were heavily reliant on the labour of African slaves. Sir Thomas is a member of Parliament and therefore highly aware of the bill to abolish the slave trade, which was a major cause célèbre of the day. This culminated in the Slave Trade Act of 1807 which prohibited British ships from transporting slaves from Africa to the West Indies, but not from owning slaves. Jane would have been very well informed about this. Indeed, it is widely believed that the title Mansfield Park is a reference to the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, whose legal rulings – notably the 1772 Somerset case – helped to pave the way for the abolition of slavery in England. It has also been suggested that the surname of Norris for Fanny’s tormentor, Aunt Norris, was chosen for its association with the former slave-trade Captain Robert Norris.
In 1760 Jane’s own father, the Reverend George Austen, became a trustee of a sugar plantation in Antigua belonging to a former student, James Nibbs. Several other members of the Austen family had connections or investments in Caribbean plantations, including Jane’s brothers, Frank and Charles, who visited the Caribbean while in the Navy. Charles even married the daughter of the former Attorney general of Bermuda, a slave island. One of Jane’s favourite poets was William Cowper, a committed Abolitionist, who attacked the inhuman slave trade.
After Fanny Price asks Sir Thomas about the slave trade, a “dead silence” falls upon the room where the Bertram family is installed (Mansfield Park 184). Fanny herself could be considered an allegory for a grateful slave herself in that she is deliberately excluded as an outcast in the Bertram family and totally reliant on the whims and decisions of Sir Thomas about her fate. He even tries to marry Fanny off for money to Henry Crawford who desires to have control over Fanny’ emotions to stoke his own ego. In a sense there is an analogy between Fanny and the enslaved individuals on Sir Thomas’ plantation. Fanny baulks at the comparative poverty of her mother and father’s house in Southampton when she is sent back there by Sir Thomas to reflect on her refusal to marry Henry Crawford. Slave money has apparently not “tainted” her childhood home and is financially – if not morally – poorer for it.
Who Was Jane Austen?
Austen wrote several classic novels, including Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), Northanger Abbey (1817) and Persuasion (1817). Her novel Sanditon (1817) was never finished due to illness. Both Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously in the same volume, with the credit to “The Author of Pride and Prejudice”. Pride and Prejudice was credited to “by the author of Sense and Sensibility”. Austen wrote major novels before the age of twenty-two but was not published until thirty-five. Her novels were not published with her name on the title page in her lifetime. She used the by-line “By a Lady”, a common practice for women writers at the time, theoretically allowing books to be judged on their own merits rather than any prejudice.
Jane is believed to have written approximately 3,000 letters, but fewer than 160 survive. The earliest known letter is one written around the age of twenty; none survive from her childhood. Her sister, Cassandra burnt most of Jane’s letters after her death in an attempt to protect the reputation of the increasingly famous Jane and so that any acid and forthright comments Jane had written did not reach their targets’ ears. As Virginia Woolf writes, “hence our knowledge of Jane Austen is derived from a little gossip, a few letters and her books”. Her cousin, Philadelphia Austen, wrote that Jane “is not at all pretty and very prim, unlike a girl of twelve”. Mary Russell Mitford, a contemporary essayist and novelist, wrote that Jane was “perpendicular, precise and taciturn…a poker of whom everyone is afraid” (Woolf). Her family promoted the image of the “good quiet Jane”. He brother Henry wrote that “of events her life was singularly barren: few changes and no great crisis ever broke the smooth current of its course” (Tomalin 4). Austen herself acknowledged that her life was somewhat limited in outlook and her novels narrow in scope. She compared her own writing to the delicate art of miniaturist painting on ivory, “a little bit (two inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour” (Letters 16 December 1816). It was perhaps through theatre that her world view was expanded somewhat.
Jane and her sister Cassandra were poor much of their lives after their father died, and they were left dependent on the support of their brothers. It is perhaps for this reason that many of Austen’s female characters are focused on finding “a single man in possession of a good fortune” to marry and find financial security. Jane flirted with a young Irish lawyer Tom Lefroy in 1976, but nothing came of the relationship. In 1802 Jane accepted the marriage proposal of Harris Bigg-Wither, the rich brother of her friends, but the next day she changed her mind and she refused the proposal. She never married and neither did Cassandra. In April 1817 she fell ill and wrote a short will leaving everything to Cassandra. She moved from Chawton to Winchester for medical treatment in May and died on 18 July 1817 at 41 years old. She is buried in Winchester Cathedral. It is believed that Jane died of Addison’s disease and Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a form of cancer.
Austen’s Theatrical Legacy
Jane never aspired to be a playwright. Sheridan, perhaps the leading playwright of the day, often commissioned adaptations and thought Pride and Prejudice one of the cleverest things he ever read, but in 1813 he was dying and did not get around to realising a production. Fittingly, Austen’s enthusiasm for the theatre has spawned a kind of homecoming with many theatre productions of her work, from traditional adaptions to musicals, TV mini-series, jazz ballets, impro, puppet shows and films. As Spennicchia of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) claims “Austen is very adaptable for the stage because she wrote like a screenwriter…She really writes for the visual” (Considine). Screenwriters glory that whole scenes could be imported into film-form with little need for adaptation.
There is a wide range of genres inspired by Austen: sequels, prequels, retellings, fan fiction and parodies imaging Austen’s themes in different contexts or with new storylines. There are also “paraliterature” versions of Austen including Mr Darcy’s Diary, Austenland, The Jane Austen Book Club and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, to name but a few. Even minor works have been adapted, including Love and Friendship, based on Austen’s epistolary novel Lady Susan (and the title of one of Austen’s own juvenile plays), and the unfinished Sanditon. Austen’s treatment of romance, her feminism and strong women characters, the exploration of the dependence of women on marriage for economic security in certain cultures, her nods at politics, social and class issues, are still pertinent today. As Spennicchia opines “Austen is seen as a viable market. Whatever is being done, it is a given that Austen enthusiasts are going to see it – good, bad or indifferent. We want to see her works and we want to hear her words.” (Considine).
In 1852, George Henry Lewes – the partner of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), the novelist – had an extremely high opinion of Austen and wrote that she “has the rare and difficult art of dramatic presentation” (Byrne 1). It is clear that Jane’s playgoing, her interest in theatre, her acting in and writing of plays, her reading of plays both privately and aloud in family circles, were a major influence on her literary outlook and output of her theatrical, “dramatic” novels.
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Works Cited
Austen, Jane. 1995. Jane Austen’s Letters. Ed. Deidre Le Faye. 3rd ed. Oxford: UOP.
Austen, Jane. 2014. Mansfield Park. London: Penguin Classics.
Austen, Jane. 2003. Pride and Prejudice. London: Penguin Classics.
Byrne, Paula. 2017. The Genius of Jane Austen. London: William Collins.
Considine, Allison. 2016. “Move Over, Dickens: Jane Austen Is Theatre’s New Literary Brand”, https://americantheatre.org/2016/07/18. Accessed 6 July 2025.
Gay, Penny. 2002. Jane Austen and the Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
janeausteninfo. “Did Jane Austen approve of plays?”. https://janeausteninfo.wixsite.com. Accessed 6 July 2025.
Tomalin, Claire. 2012. Jane Austen: A Life. London: Penguin Books.
Woolf, Virginia. 1925. https://monadock.net. Accessed July 2 2025.
Ian Butcher is English-Belgian independent scholar living in Belgium and Denmark with his Danish wife. He has degrees from the Universities of Kent and York, and a Master of Arts (Distinction) from The Open University in the UK. He was a lecteur d’anglais at the University of Nice in France and taught in various institutions throughout Europe. He has published a number of academic articles on Beckett, Pinter, Annie Ernaux, Nancy Cunard, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, theatre topics and the importance of working titles in Titology. He worked as a Senior Vice President in the European office of a US-based management consulting company for over thirty years.
[1] “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”, Pride and Prejudice.