Lesley Castle

Lesley Castle

This autumn will see the world premiere of a stage adaptation of an unfinished Jane Austen novel, which she wrote aged 16 in 1792. Lesley Castle was not published until 1922 and is the only novel by Jane Austen to be partly set in Bristol.

Local historian and regular Bristol Times contributor Jonathan Rowe has adapted and completed the novel for Gemini Players, an amateur community theatre group based in Brislington.

The production will be staged at St Luke’s Church Hall, Church Parade, Brislington, from October 22–24 at 7.30 pm, with a 2.30 pm matinee performance.

Tickets are £12 and are available from Jackie Wadsworth on 07388 774516 or by email at jax.wadsworth@gmail.com.

“Lesley Castle has never been adapted and completed for stage, TV or screen. Jane Austen wrote it as a parody of the then-fashionable ‘epistolary novel’ (a story told in the form of letters), and it has been described as an ‘unpolished farce’.

The story concerns two sets of sisters: Matilda and Margaret Lesley of Lesley Castle in Scotland, and their friends, Charlotte and Eloisa Lutterell of Sussex.

The Lutterell sisters journey to enjoy the ‘healthy air of Bristol and the reviving waters of the Hotwells’ after Charlotte’s fiancé has been killed in a horse-riding accident shortly before their wedding.

While in Bristol, the sisters meet Mr and Mrs Marlowe, who are visiting Bristol for the health of their young son, and Mrs Marlowe’s eligible ‘Darcy-esque’ brother, Mr Cleveland, who has a large estate and fortune and therefore, as Austen later wrote in the opening words of Pride and Prejudice, he ‘must be in want of a wife’.

There’s an obligatory Austen ball scene at the London home of society hostess the Honourable Mrs Kickabout, where the characters discover something most disconcerting – they’re all fictional!

The story is resolved with help from Mrs Catherine Anne Hubback (1818–1877), Jane Austen’s real-life novelist niece, whose husband is buried in St Luke’s churchyard, just across the road from the church hall.

A cast of 20, aged from 15 to 70-plus, bring Jane Austen’s hilarious characters to life with the help of pop music from over seven decades, with hits from ABBA, Pulp and Taylor Swift.

The play is directed by semi-professional actress and drama teacher Emma Bunce, who also plays Susan Fitzgerald, a woman with a shady past who upsets the calm of Lesley Castle itself!

If you’re a Jane Austen fan or love Netflix’s Bridgerton, this is the show for you! In the words of Mr Spock, ‘It’s Jane Austen – but not as we know it’.

We all know the ending of Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Sense and Sensibility, but no one knows what fates were to befall the characters of Lesley Castle – not even Jane Austen herself!

For further information, please contact Jonathan Rowe:

jonathandavidrowe1@outlook.com

0117 9418642
07923 250362

Jonathan Rowe, 2026