Tales of a Jane Austen Spinster – Etcetera Theatre, London

Writer and Director: Alexandra Jorgenson

How would one of Jane Austen’s heroines react to the contemporary dating scene, with its dick-pics, mansplaining, and aubergine emojis? This is the potentially-hilarious question that Alexandra Jorgensen’s one-woman play,Tales of a Jane Austen Spinster, sets out to answer.

Jane Austen was born 250 years ago this year, and every village and gallery in the country with any hint of a connection to the novelist is celebrating this literary anniversary. There are TV dramas, walking tours, exhibitions, and Jorgensen’s 50-minute show, which first appeared in Edinburgh in 2023, has transferred from this year’s Brighton Fringe to take a celebratory tour of London pubs.

In the simply-staged setting of the Jane Austen house-museum, fictional lace-frock-clad, fan-wielding young spinster Lily Bentley materialises from an imaginary unfinished novel. She arrives in a flurry of dust sheets and sepia manuscript pages to complain that her author has left her without a romantic happy ending. Discovering a smartphone, Lily initially assumes it is an agent of sorcery, amusingly trying to trap it with her flowered bonnet.

It’s surprising how quickly Lily manages to get the hang of swiping and clicking. She sets up a dating profile, and her excitement soon turns to disgust at the parlous state of the modern world. “Has the art of conversation completely died?” she wails, faced with a string of emojis and worse. “What has happened to etiquette, to basic human manners?” On receiving unsolicited photos, she comments archly: “Do they really look like that? How unfortunate.”

Various other characters appear as disembodied voices, from the narcissistic date who speaks without listening, to a thong-wielding underwear seller. Lighting and sound effects help conjure up the motorised cacophony of contemporary life.

There are plenty of jokes, but the clash of registers that could have made the entertaining central conceit come alive is not quite realised. Lily doesn’t really speak in Regency English beyond the odd “scoundrel” and some slightly formal language. Some of Jorgenson’s script is a compilation of modern clichés about love, the finding and deserving thereof. Lily seems to have a contemporary sensibility, striving for self-actualisation and making therapy-style lists of things she likes about herself.

There are speeches about “being seen” and the “terror of presenting oneself to the world”. The play draws apt parallels between Jane Austen’s world and our own. Lily compares waiting for dating-app notifications to “waiting for gentlemen callers”. She reflects on how little progress two centuries seem to have brought about in gender relations.

Jorgensen is a likeable performer, interacting with friendly, self-deprecating Texan charm. She brings humour and pathos to Lily’s story. Her character’s optimism struggles to survive in the face of contemporary mores. As it turns out, it’s not too many steps from Lily Bentley’s innocence to a Bridget Jones-style cynicism. Helen Fielding’s love interest for Bridget Jones was a rich and reserved man called Darcy, so her novels’ parallels with Pride and Prejudice are well-trodden turf.

What Jorgenson’s play about Austen lacks in irony, it makes up for in starry-eyed disquisitions on the problems of finding a soulmate and the need to write our own stories. She sees Austen as the creator of different types of women, the fountain of good manners, and the mistress of romantic narrative satisfaction.

The anniversary of Austen’s birth has highlighted how many different interpretations there are of the writer’s life and work. Was she an unhappy spinster who could write about love but not find it for herself? Or a powerful woman, eschewing the domesticity that might have sapped her creative genius? The great novelist manages to be different things to different readers: feminist, pioneer, disruptor, satirist, pragmatist, love-story-writer, psychologist. Jorgenson’s version of Austen is romantic but realistic, polite but feisty. It makes for a brief, entertaining foray into the topical author’s world.

Reviewed on 8 June 2025 and continues touring