Probably the best-known example of a private theatrical in the Georgian period is a fictional one: the scheme to stage Lovers' Vows in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814). Literary critics have tended to focus on the moral and philosophical dimensions of Austen's representation of acting in the novel, taking its apparent antitheatricalism for granted, and it is only comparatively recently that the complexity of her engagement with private theatricals, and indeed with the theatre in general, has been properly acknowledged. Mansfield Park not only reveals Austen's familiarity with the practicalities of getting up a play in a country house in the early nineteenth century; it also demonstrates her awareness of how the fashion for private theatricals could illuminate some central concerns of Georgian society and culture, such as the relationship between public and private spheres, the changing meanings of family and issues of gender, sexuality, class and national identity. Insofar as Lovers' Vows is never actually staged in the novel (Austen instead focusing on preparations for a performance abandoned after the unexpected arrival of Sir Thomas Bertram) Mansfield Park illustrates the way in which the sociable rituals associated with private theatricals became at least as important as the performance itself. For the Georgians, the play was never entirely the thing: they were equally fascinated with the sociable, spatial and material contexts in which play-making took place. Because it was invested in such contexts, commemorated in ephemeral literature such as tickets and playbills, the phenomenon of private theatricals is especially revealing of this aspect of eighteenth-century theatrical culture as a whole.