A Collection of Letters (Dramatic Reading)

Author(s): Jane Austen

Genre(s): Dramatic Readings, Epistolary Fiction, Satire

Narrators: Group

Number of Chapters: 5

Length: 49 minutes

Language: English

A Collection of Letters is an epistolary short story collection written by Jane Austen when she was fourteen years old. Although the novels Austen became known for were not published until she was in her thirties, she was an active writer from the age of twelve, frequently composing epistolary works such as A Collection of Letters. Austen eventually compiled 29 of her early writings in three notebooks that became known as the Juvenilia and that she called “Volume the First”, “Volume the Second”, and “Volume the Third”, including A Collection of Letters in “Volume the Second”.

A Collection of Letters is set contemporaneously to Austen’s writing and consists of a series of five letters, each written by a woman of high society living in Great Britain. Unlike Austen’s later epistolary works, A Collection of Letters is not a novelette; each of these five letters tells a self-contained story, with no characters appearing in multiple letters. Nonetheless, the collection is unified in its lighthearted, humorous tone. Austen dedicated A Collection of Letters to her cousin Jane Cooper, who married famed Royal Navy officer Thomas Williams two years later and who died in a horse accident before the end of that decade; Williams went on to marry again twice, reputedly because his first marriage was so happy. Ironically, there are multiple parallels between Cooper’s later life and the second letter of this collection. - Summary by David Purdy

Cast List:

Jane Austen: Michele Eaton
A. F.: WendyKatzHiller
Augusta: Krista Zaleski
Sophia: Jenn Broda
Miss Jane: Lynette Caulkins
Maria Williams: Hannah Dormor
Mrs Williams: Therese Lindholm
Lady Greville: Dawn Sutton
Ellen Greville: Kaye Burke
Impertinent young lady: TJ Burns
Miss Grenville: Bethany Baldwin
Henrietta Halton: Michelle Purdy
Tom Musgrove: David Purdy
Lady Scudamore: Anna Maria
Narrator: James R. Hedrick