Join JASNA-NJ for a discussion of the play Lover’s Vows over Zoom on Saturday, November 18th at 2pm. You can register here.
Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse by Sir Joshua Reynolds
Lover’s Vows—the play that scandalized Mansfield Park—was a real play and very popular in Austen’s day.
You can read it at Project Gutenberg here.
The play was so popular Austen presumes her readers were familiar with it, which isn’t the case today. Most people have only heard of it because of Mansfield Park.
During our meeting, we’ll discuss the play, its role in the novel, theatricality in Mansfield Park, and 19th century theater (including Shakespeare). Participants can also bring a short, selected passage they’d like to read from the play!
According to the background provided by Jane Austen’s House:
Lovers’ Vows by Mrs Inchbald was one of a number of adaptations of August von Kotzebue‘s Das Kind der Liebe (which translates as ‘Love Child’) published between 1798 and 1800, but it was the only one to be staged. The play met with huge success when it was first performed at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, in October 1798.
As the original German title suggests, the play deals with the issue of extra-marital sex, seduction and illegitimacy. Contemporary critics expressed concern at the depiction of the lower-class characters as more morally upright and virtuous than the aristocratic characters, Baron Wildenhaim and Count Cassel, who had both seduced and abandoned young women from the poorer classes.
| Character | Portrayer | |
| Agatha Friburg | Maria Bertram | |
| Frederick | Henry Crawford | |
| Cottager & Butler | Tom Bertram | |
| Cottager’s Wife | Mrs. Grant | |
| Baron Wildenhaim | Mr. Yates | |
| Amelia | Mary Crawford | |
| Count Cassel | Mr. Rushworth | |
| Anhalt | Edmund Bertram |
Less turgid than The Mysteries of Udolpho! And shorter! We hope you can join us in a discussion of this text that is so important in Austen’s Mansfield Park.
Jane Austen Society of North America - New Jersey Region 