Austen’s Women

Actress Rebecca Vaughan has been here before, in January last, with her one-woman show I, Elizabeth. That was a refined, neatly designed and costumed affair supporting a well written direct-to-audience performance, given without a break and nicely sustained for over an hour.

Recently, on a return visit to the Annesley Hall Newcastle (November 13), she excelled herself, in a much more ambitious and demanding show, based on over a dozen female characters who feature in Jane Austen’s six published novels and in her various other writings. Austen buffs of course would have known where Mary Stanhope, Diana Parker and Elizabeth Watson– Austen’s opera rara -came from.

For the rest of us it was simply delightful to meet again, but without the safety net of a fuller overarching context (no time for that in this sort of production), the more familiar women characters from Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma - all written early (from about 1796), revised constantly but published anonymously and very late in Jane Austen’s short life (she died at 41) – and then Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both of which appeared after her death in 1817. She enjoyed very little personal fame when alive.

Astonishingly it wasn’t until the 1940s that she was finally acknowledged as the first great proto-feminist romantic novelist, a very well-read and self-educated young woman with great natural literary skills and very moral attitudes. All six of her major works were set in her own very circumscribed upper middle-class south of England society.

All featured young heroines (well, from about 17 to 40) and ended in happy marriages, but not without trails of vicissitudes.There may be little dramatic narrative coincidence or diverting plot points in her stories (you find that later in the three Brontë sisters’ output) but there was lots of stylish writing about misunderstood feelings, neglect of social responsibilities and shared human weaknesses.

That was more precisely where the meaning and drama of her women was seated, their dry humour and elegant wit, in a male-centric, closed world where your best option was really only to marry for love – if you could. “She had large, dark eyes and a brilliant complexion, and long, long black hair down to her knees.”

Thus was Austen described in a letter written by one of her nieces, Louisa Knight (who later came to live in Ireland and was buried in Donegal). Rebecca Vaughan, blue-eyed and blonde, has been touring her Austens since the Edinburgh Festival in 2009 and the show felt as fresh and as free of caricature as it must have done then.

The staging, costume changes and bare feet epitomised uncluttered simplicity, while the most nuanced of lighting accompanied the smooth, almost invisible segues between Narrator and character, like an accomplished operatic soprano transiting from récitatif to aria.

Elizabeth Bennet, one of Austen’s most complete and complex characters, both opened and closed the journey, which was consistently more interesting than the destination. The tears were real and the women were sharply delineated: Marianne and Fanny Dashwood (and the matter of the three thousand pounds); Mrs Norris; and Miss Bates (at full, breathless throttle), Emma, Harriet (with her collection of trivia, recalling Madama Butterfly’s paltry dowry), and Mrs Elton.

Very striking too were Catherine Morland, only 17, and Mary Musgrove (and her sick child), from the last two novels. All the Austen works have been adapted for cinema and television several times over, sometimes magnificently, but they took nothing from Vaughan’s single-minded, single-handed but more tightly cropped focus and performance.

Difficult choices were made, and Fanny Price for example was not there, but then elsewhere she had had a whole opera to herself, Jonathan Dove’s Mansfield Park, which had its world première in August when the role was sung by Serenna Wagner. Rebecca Vaughan returns on January 22, to the new Down Arts Centre, in her first two-hander, with Elton Townend Jones, in their adaptation of the Mark Twain Diaries of Adam and Eve.

(George Fleeton teaches literature, cinema and opera studies in higher education.)