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Introduction

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Jane Austen and Performance

Abstract

This introduction traces Austen’s early encounters with the world of performance and her first readers’ “performance” of Austen and her works: from Austen’s incursions into playwriting to Annabella Milbanke (the future Lady Byron), Princess Charlotte and Mary Mitford playing (with) Austen and her texts. It also discusses the Austen family’s transformation of the novelist into public spectacle, mostly through to her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    These works are “The Visit: A Comedy in Two Acts”, “The Mystery: A Comedy” (c. 1787–1790) and “The First Act of a Comedy” (c. 1793). For more information on the Austens’ home theatricals, see Paula Byrne’s Jane Austen and the Theatre (London: Hambledon and London, 2002), Chapter 1 (Byrne 2002). Byrne believes that “The Visit” might have been performed as a burlesque afterpiece to James Townley’s High Life Below Stairs (Christmas 1788) and “The Mystery” as part of what the Austens called their “private Theatrical Exhibition” in the same year (pp. 12–14). According to Clare Tomalin, Jane Austen might have even taken part in the family’s performance of Sheridan’s The Rivals in 1784. Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (London: Viking, 1997), 40. (Tomalin 1997)

  2. 2.

    According to B. C. Southam, the high number of stage directions suggests that the author had performance in mind and was interested in how actors should move onstage. The role of Charlotte Grandison, the hero’s domineering sister, might have been interpreted by Austen’s outlandish cousin Eliza de Feuillide. Southam, Jane Austen’s “Sir Charles Grandison” (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 12, 33. (Southam 1981)

  3. 3.

    Southam, Jane Austen’s “Sir Charles Grandison”, 10–11 (Southam 1981). Family tradition has it that Anna, not Jane, was the author of Grandison as the manuscript shows evidence of various hands, including a child’s—Anna was 7 in 1790, when Act One is thought to have been completed. Nowadays, since B. C. Southam brought the text to light, Austen is generally regarded as its primary author.

  4. 4.

    Quoted in B. C. Southam, “Introduction”, in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1811–1870, ed. B. C. Southam (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), 7. (Southam 1968)

  5. 5.

    Princess Charlotte to Miss Mercer Elphinstone, The Letters of Princess Charlotte, 1811–1818, ed. Arthur Aspinall (London: Home and Van Thal, 1949), 26. (Elphinstone 1949)

  6. 6.

    Mary Mitford, “Miss Mitford on Jane Austen, 1814”, in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1811–1870, ed. B. C. Southam, 55. (Mitford 1968)

  7. 7.

    For a detailed account of how Austen became a model for the woman writer in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (from Mary Mitford to Virginia Woolf), see Katie Halsey’s Jane Austen and Her Readers, 1786–1945 (London: Anthem Press, 2012) (Halsey 2012). Halsey also discusses at length some of the Victorian communities of Austen readers, such as the Darwin and the Macaulay families.

  8. 8.

    Before 1870, only six newspaper articles focused on Austen and her work, the main one being Sir Walter Scott’s review of Emma (Quarterly Review 1816). After the publication of the Memoir, numbers significantly increased in the space of two years. Southam, Critical Heritage, 1811–1870, 1. (Southam 1968)

  9. 9.

    Henry, for instance, noted that “though in composition she was equally rapid and correct, yet an invincible distrust of her own judgement induced her to withhold her works from the public, till time and many perusals had satisfied her that the charm of recent composition was dissolved”. Henry Austen, “Biographical Notice of the Author” (1818), in A Memoir of Jane Austen, and Other Family Recollections, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 139. (Austen 2002)

  10. 10.

    See for instance “Jane Austen”, Saturday Review 29, no. 743, 1870, 119–120; “Jane Austen”, Times, 17 January 1870, 5; M. E. S, “Jane Austen, the Sunbeam of Steventon Parsonage”, Young Folks Paper, 5 December 1885, 356.

  11. 11.

    It is perhaps not accidental that there is no stage adaptation of Austen’s work until 1895 (Rosina Filippi’s Duologues and Scenes from Jane Austen’s Novels. (Filippi 1895)

  12. 12.

    G. H. Lewes, “The Novels of Jane Austen”, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, July 1859, 99–113, 105. (Lewes 1859)

  13. 13.

    Ibid., 102, 104–105. (Lewes 1859)

  14. 14.

    Byrne, Jane Austen and the Theatre (Byrne 2002); Penny Gay, Jane Austen and the Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). (Gay 2002)

  15. 15.

    J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (London: Oxford University Press, 1955/76). (Austin 1955/1976)

  16. 16.

    Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990). (Butler 1990)

  17. 17.

    Recent studies of racial performativity include Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson’s A Race so Different: Performance and Law in Asian America (New York: New York University Press, 2013) (Chambers-Letson 2013) and Ramy M. K. Aly’s Becoming Arab in London: Performativity and the Undoing of Identity (London: Pluto Press, 2015) (Aly 2015). However, these are just the tip of the iceberg.

  18. 18.

    Butler, Gender Trouble. (Butler 1990)

  19. 19.

    Butler, “Burning Acts: Injurious Speech”, in Performativity and Performance, ed. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (London: Routledge, 1995), 197–227, 205; italics in the original. (Butler 1995)

  20. 20.

    Ibid. (Butler 1995)

  21. 21.

    Butler, Gender Trouble, 185. (Butler 1990)

  22. 22.

    For a detailed discussion of how editors have built up the seemingly stable and fixed Austen text, see Kathryn Sutherland’s Jane Austen’s Textual Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). (Sutherland 2005)

  23. 23.

    A good theoretical discussion of the mechanics of adaptation can be found in Linda Hutcheon’s Theory of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2006). (Hutcheon 2006)

  24. 24.

    Butler, Gender Trouble, 193. (Butler 1990)

  25. 25.

    In Searching for Jane Austen, Emily Auerbach set herself the task of finding the “real” Jane Austen, lamenting that in the twenty-first century, with the upsurge of all forms of Austenalia, it is impossible to find the author anywhere. Along the same lines, Paula Byrne titled her recent, and certainly brilliant, biography of the author The Real Jane Austen. Auerbach, Searching for Jane Austen (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004) (Auerbach 2004); Byrne, The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things (London: HarperPress, 2013). (Byrne 2013)

  26. 26.

    For an enlightened discussion of evolving approaches to theatricality and performativity, see Josette Féral, “Foreword”, SubStance 31, no. 2/3 (2002): 3–13. (Féral 2002)

  27. 27.

    Butler, “Preface 1999”, Gender Trouble, xxvi–xxvii (Butler 1990); Féral, “Foreword”, 5. (Féral 2002)

  28. 28.

    “Literary & Other Notices”, Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 25 May 1895, 8; “The Bennets”, The Times, 28 April 1923, 8.

  29. 29.

    Legendary theatre critic Max Beerbohm reviewed the production at the Royal Court and called Filippi’s adaptation “clever”. Max Beerbohm, More Theatres 1898–1903 (London: Hart-Davis, 1969), 364 (Beerbohm 1969). At the Royal Court and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Filippi’s play was performed under the title of “The Bennets” (unpublished). The textual connection between “The Bennets” and her printed Duologues and Scenes (Filippi 1895) remains unclear.

  30. 30.

    Scottish Theatre Archive, University of Glasgow (STA Fc 1/6c).

  31. 31.

    One of the most successful film adaptations remains Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (1995) (Lee 1995), which grossed over $100 million worldwide in addition to the success of its tie-in products—such as Emma Thompson’s screenplay and film diary, which sold out its first edition of 28,500 copies and went through a second printing of 5,000.

  32. 32.

    This commercial impetus has been part of Austen’s reception since at least the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when members of the Austen family started selling their heirlooms. As Sutherland notes, by the 1920s the family was selling the manuscript of the Juvenilia (Volume the First), and as early as 1891, Lord Brabourne (Austen’s great-nephew) had been trying to sell some of Austen’s letters at Sotheby’s. Sutherland, Textual Lives, 203, 239 (Sutherland 2005). In the early twentieth century, the Austen industry was also energised by the nostalgic move toward rural England that followed World War I (see Chapters 3 and 4 in this volume).

  33. 33.

    Saintsbury, “Preface”, in Pride and Prejudice (London: George Allen, 1894), ix–xxiii, ix. (Saintsbury 1894)

  34. 34.

    Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1994). (Bloom 1994)

  35. 35.

    Butler, Gender Trouble, 192. (Butler 1990)

  36. 36.

    Lewes, “The Novels of Jane Austen”, 100. (Lewes 1859)

  37. 37.

    The dominant trend in Austen studies since the 1970s has been historicist: in Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (1988), (Johnson 1988), Claudia Johnson took issue with Alistair Duckworth’s and Marilyn Butler’s reading of Austen as conservative. More recently, William Galperin (2003) has tried to “re-historicise” Austen by presenting her as neither consistently conservative nor progressive. Galperin connects Austen to her romantic contemporaries and to the theorists of the picturesque. Similarly, Clara Tuite (2002) has re-evaluated Austen’s novels in a Romantic context, arguing that her works participate in the contemporary strategy of naturalising the countryside. In contrast, Peter Knox-Shaw (2004) views Austen as the heiress of Enlightenment philosophy and the sceptical tradition of the second half of the eighteenth century.

  38. 38.

    Recent studies focusing on responses up to the mid-twentieth century include Claudia L. Johnson’s Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures (2012) (Johnson 2012) and Katie Halsey’s Jane Austen and her Readers, 1786–1945 (2012) (Halsey 2012). In contrast, Juliette Wells’s Everybody’s Jane (2011) (Wells 2011), Deborah Yaffe’s Among the Janeites (2013) (Yaffe 2013) and Gillian Dow and Clare Hanson’s edited collection Uses of Austen (2012) (Dow and Hanson 2012) lean towards the contemporary.

  39. 39.

    Halsey’s study and my own form an interesting tandem: I analyse the afterlives as manifestations of varying responses to Austen; Halsey examines how the editions and illustrations of the novels affected the way Austen was read. In this sense, Halsey’s work and my own can be seen as complementary, showing Austen’s reception as a double-sided phenomenon. Katie Halsey, Jane Austen and her Readers, 1786 –1945 (London: Anthem Press, 2012). (Halsey 2012)

  40. 40.

    The two classic studies of Austen on screen are Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield’s Jane Austen in Hollywood (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998) (Troost and Greenfield 1998) and Gina and Andrew Macdonald’s Jane Austen on Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) (Macdonald and Macdonald 2003), although many more have been published in the last few years.

  41. 41.

    A few studies tackle the peripatetic quality of the Austen text, although more research is needed: The Reception of Jane Austen in Europe, ed. Anthony Mandal and Brian Southam (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2007) (Mandal and Southam 2007) and Global Jane Austen: Pleasure, Passion, and Possessiveness in the Jane Austen Community, ed. Laurence Raw and Robert Dryden (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). (Raw and Dryden 2013)

  42. 42.

    H. Philip Bolton, Women Writers Dramatized: A Calendar of Performances from Narrative Works Published in English to 1900 (London: Mansell, 2000), 195 (Bolton 2000). This anthology does not include an entry for Burney. Of course, factors such as the length of Burney’s novels could explain playwrights’ reticence to rework them. Yet, as Chapter 4 explores, in the early twentieth century it was customary to use short scenes from Austen’s novels for school performance. The same selection process could undoubtedly have been applied to Burney’s extensive works. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, in contrast, was extremely popular on stage, with over one hundred dramatic versions, albeit most productions seem to have taken place in the second half of the nineteenth century. Bolton, Women Writers Dramatized, 75–94. (Bolton 2000)

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  1. University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Marina Cano

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Cano, M. (2017). Introduction. In: Jane Austen and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43988-4_1

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