Acting Like a Lady

Acting Like a Lady examines the impact of the eighteenth-century theater on the ways British women novelists represented female subjectivity. The theater, Nachumi demonstrates, offered women alternatives to contemporary models of feminine nature that insisted on a direct correlation between a lady’s appearance and her quality of mind. It provided theatrical images and tropes that helped women writers dramatize the performative nature of female experience. Grounded in theater history, Acting Like a Lady draws on current theoretical work concerning gender and representation on the stage and in novels. It considers its primary subjects (Burney, Inchbald, Austen) in depth, and places them in relation to each other and to other novelists, performers, and playwrights. In each case, the novelist’s use of theatrical images and practices is linked to her own theatrical experience and to debates relevant to the eighteenth-century stage. Especially valuable to scholars is the appendix demonstrating that approximately one-third of the female novelists writing between 1660 and 1818 were actresses, playwrights, or part of a theatrical milieu. Acting Like a Lady envisions these women as participants in a critical conversation about female nature and performance that continues today.