James is returned from France and is to be of the acting party.’23
Eliza was clearly used to getting her own way. But Philadelphia’s firm resolve not to act surprised both Eliza and the Austen family:
I received your letter yesterday my dear friend and need not tell you how much I am concerned at your not being able to comply with a request which in all probability I shall never have it in my power to make again … I will only allow myself to take notice of the strong reluctance you express to what you call appearing in Publick. I assure you our performance is to be by no means a publick one, since only a selected party of friends will be present.24
According to Eliza, Philadelphia’s visit to Steventon was dependent on her compliance with joining the acting party: ‘You wish to know the exact time which we should be satisfied with, and therefore I proceed to acquaint you that a fortnight from New Years Day would do, provided however you could bring yourself to act, for my Aunt Austen declares “she has not room for any idle young people”.’25
Despite Eliza’s repeated assurances that the parts were very short, Philadelphia resisted her cousin’s efforts and stayed away. Eliza appears to have attributed this to Mrs Walter’s interference: ‘Shall I be candid and tell you the thought which has struck me on this occasion? – The insuperable objection to my proposal is, some scruples of your mother’s about your acting. If this is the case I can only say it is [a] pity so groundless a prejudice should be harboured in so enlightened [and so] enlarged a mind.’26 The Austens showed no such prejudice against private theatricals and Bon Ton was performed some time during this period. There is a surviving epilogue written by James.27
The first play that was presented at Steventon in 1787 was not, however, Garrick’s farce, but Susanna Centlivre’s lively comedy, The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714). As usual James wrote a prologue and an epilogue. The Wonder was an excellent choice for Eliza: she played the part of the spirited heroine, Donna Violante, who risks her own marriage and reputation by choosing to protect her friend, Donna Isabella, from an arranged marriage to a man she despises. The play engages in the battle-of-the-sexes debate that Eliza particularly enjoyed. Women are ‘inslaved’ to ‘the Tyrant Man’; and whether they be fathers, husbands or brothers, they ‘usurp authority, and expect a blind obedience from us, so that maids, wives, or widows, we are little better than slaves’.28
The play’s most striking feature is a saucy proposal of marriage from Isabella, though made on her behalf by Violante in disguise, to a man she barely knows. Twenty-seven years later, Jane Austen would incorporate private theatricals into her new novel, and the play, Lovers’ Vows, would contain a daring proposal of marriage from a vivacious young woman.29
The Austen family clearly had no objection whatsoever to the depiction in Centlivre’s comedy of strong, powerful women who claim their rights to choose their own husbands, and show themselves capable of loyalty and firm friendship. James’s epilogue ‘spoken by a lady in the character of Violante’ leaves us in no doubt of the Austens’ awareness of the play’s theme of female emancipation:
In Barbarous times, e’er learning’s sacred light
Rose to disperse the shades of Gothic night
And bade fair science wide her beams display,
Creation’s fairest part neglected lay.
In vain the form where grace and ease combined.
In vain the bright eye spoke th’ enlightened mind,
Vain the sweet smiles which secret love reveal,
Vain every charm, for there were none to feel.
From tender childhood trained to rough alarms,
Choosing no music but the clang of arms;
Enthusiasts only in the listed field,
Our youth there knew to fight, but not to yield.
Nor higher deemed of beauty’s utmost power,
Than the light play thing of their idle hour.
Such was poor woman’s lot – whilst tyrant men
At once possessors of the sword and pen
All female claim with stern pedantic pride
To prudence, truth and secrecy denied,
Covered their tyranny with specious words
And called themselves creation’s mighty lords –
But thank our happier Stars, those times are o’er;
And woman holds a second place no more.
Now forced to quit their long held usurpation,
Men all wise, these ‘Lords of the Creation’!
To our superior sway themselves submit,
Slaves to our charms, and vassals to our wit;
We can with ease their ev’ry sense beguile,
And melt their Resolutions with a smile.30
Jane Austen’s most expressive battle-of-the-sexes debate, that between Anne Elliot and Captain Harville in Persuasion, curiously echoes James Austen’s epilogue. Denied the ‘exertion’ of the battlefield and a ‘profession’, women have been forced to live quietly. James’s remonstrance that ‘Tyrant men [are] at once possessors of the sword and pen’ is more gently reiterated in Anne Elliot’s claim that ‘Men have had every advantage of us in telling their story … the pen has been in their hands’ (P, p. 234).
There were two performances of The Wonder after Christmas. The evident success of the play was followed up in the new year by a production of Garrick’s adaptation of The Chances (1754), for which James, once again, wrote a prologue. This play was to be Eliza’s final performance for some time.
Once again James and Henry chose a racy comedy: originally written by Beaumont and Fletcher, the play had been altered by the Duke of Buckingham and in 1754 ‘new-dressed’ by Garrick. Although Garrick had made a concerted effort to tone it down, the play was still considered to contain strong dialogue. So thought Mrs Inchbald in her Remarks, which prefaced her edition of the play: ‘That Garrick, to the delicacy of improved taste, was compelled to sacrifice much of their libertine dialogue, may well be suspected, by the remainder which he spared.’31
The Austen family did not share such compunction. Like The Wonder, Garrick’s play depicts jealous lovers, secret marriages and confused identities. The two heroines, both confusingly called Constantia, are mistaken for one another. The first Constantia is mistaken for a prostitute, although she is in fact secretly married to the Duke
