Heavenly Houses, Devilish Wit

It is with some irony to note that despite the controlling school years calendars — the ebb and flow of semesters, sports and winter break — during which most 21st century girls consume with some fervor the works of Jane Austen, the 19th century author of landed gentry romances scarcely replied upon the seasons for setting. Apart from her final published work, “Persuasion,” a more staid expression of aging and the equinox of autumn, the country lands Austen’s characters inhabit exist in a kind of eternal tepid spring, with long pastoral walks thwarted only by unexpected rain — and rain, any Janeite will tell you, is just an excuse to have a heroine catch a dramatic cold.

The December holiday is tossed off casually midway through “Pride and Prejudice” via a rather fiendish, emotionally destructive letter sent to Jane Bennet from Caroline Bingley, the scheming sister of Jane’s object of affection, the affable Charles. Under the wicked but gossamer-thin guise of a confession between friends, Miss Bingley “confides” that their family has permanently absconded for the winter season and the whole lot of them are rooting for Charles to propose to Georgiana, the young ward of the brooding Mr. Darcy. “I sincerely hope your Christmas in Hertfordshire may abound in the gaieties which that season generally brings,” Caroline tosses off at the end after dashing the girl’s dreams.

A kind of “XOXO, go die.”

This mock-gesture of good Christmas tidings is well in line with Austen’s satirical writing, ever-ready to poke fun at the mannered hypocrisy of her genteel class.

This yuletide season, Shakespeare & Company takes Austen’s characters into full Christmas celebration with a staged, costumed reading of “Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley,” written by Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon, and directed by Ariel Bock. Following the novel’s conclusion and the wedding of Elizabeth Bennet to Mr. Darcy, “Miss Bennet” picks up as an alternative prologue focusing on the oft-overlooked middle Bennet sister, Mary.

Oh Mary, Mary, so very contrary — plain, vain and truly a pain. She is as untalented musically as she is in conversation. “Mary had neither genius nor taste,” Austen wrote, “and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached.” To a degree, though it hardly makes her less pedantic, she is occasionally aware of her ill-fit among others. As she herself tells her sister when it comes to gentlemen and balls, “But I confess they would have no charms for me. I should infinitely prefer a book.”

What kind of scripted suitor Gunderson and Melcon have cooked up for the sour middle child Mary Bennet… audiences will have to wait to discover.

“Miss Bennet: Christmas At Pemberley” will be performed Dec. 16 through 18 at Shakespeare & Company’s Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre in Lenox, Mass.

Illustration from ‘The Novels and Letters of Jane Austen’ edited by Reginald Bramley Johnson, 1906 Illustration by H. M. Brock

Illustration from ‘The Novels and Letters of Jane Austen’ edited by Reginald Bramley Johnson, 1906 Illustration by H. M. Brock

Illustration from ‘The Novels and Letters of Jane Austen’ edited by Reginald Bramley Johnson, 1906 Illustration by H. M. Brock