Becoming Jane on stage: queerness in early twentieth-century Austen bioplays

Abstract

Bioadaptation has become a recent trend in Austen media, from Becoming Jane (2007) and Miss Austen Regrets (2008) to the BBC series Miss Austen (2025). This article considers the role of the less studied twentieth-century bioplay in shaping Austen’s cultural legacy. Three case studies - A Pageant of Great Women (1910) by Cicely Hamilton, Jane Austen (1939) by Helen Brown, and Dear Jane (1919) by Eleanor Holmes. James Edward - are analysed using Pamela Demory’s theory of queer adaptation and Amber K. Regis’ theory of the bioplay as feminist praxis. This article argues that bioadaptation can be a form of queer, feminist praxis, as each play reimagines Austen outside of the heterosexist image popularised by Edward Austen-Leigh’s Victorian biography A Memoir of Jane Austen (1869). The bioplay genre therefore allows and encourages adapters to question gaps and silences in traditional, conservative narratives around Austen that had been widely accepted until the 1930s. The dates of the chosen case studies make clear that ‘queering’ is not synonymous with modernising, and that a queer vision of Austen has always existed in the minds of her adapters and readers.