Austen’s Women at the York Literature Festival. Studio Theatre, York Theatre Royal, Friday March 28

WE all know someone who likes a good whinge. The absolute queen of the whingers – if not the whiners – has to be Jane Austen’s Mary Musgrove.

The spoiled younger daughter of Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion, she is also the first of the Elliot girls to get married. She therefore lords it over her two elder sisters – at the same time complaining endlessly that she’s neglected, misunderstood, put upon, and always, always ill.

Her very first words in the book, uttered to her selfless sister Anne who has come to look after her, amount to a catalogue of complaints.

“So, you are come at last,” she tells her sister. “I began to think I should never see you. I am so ill I can hardly speak. I have not seen a creature the whole morning.”

Later, in a letter to Anne, her self-pity comes to the fore.

“I am sorry to say that I am very far from well; and Jemima has just told me that the butcher says there is a bad sore-throat very much about. I dare say I shall catch it; and my sore-throats, you know, are always worse than anybody’s.”

That’s the wonderful thing about Austen’s characters – especially her many memorable women. They expose themselves to us through the words they speak.

Mrs Norris, the mean-spirited aunt in Mansfield Park, always pretends to put others first – when in fact the opposite is usually true.

Here she is, describing her act of self-sacrifice in getting out of the carriage on a trip as to spare the horses: “The poor horses… to see them straining away!” she says.

“You know how I always feel for the horses. And when we got to the bottom of Sandcroft Hill, what do you think I did? You will laugh at me – but I got out and walked up. I did indeed. It might not be saving them much, but it was something, and I could not bear to sit at my ease, and be dragged up at the expense of those noble animals! I caught a dreadful cold, but that I did not regard.”

Austen was just as good at portraying silly young women. Take the teenage Mary Stanhope, one of the characters in the short novel The Three Sisters, written when Austen herself was just a girl. Mary has just been proposed to, by a man she doesn’t particularly like, and is in a whirl of rapture and panic.

“I am the happiest creature in the World, for I have received an offer of marriage from Mr. Watts,” she writes in a letter.

“It is the first I have ever had, and I hardly know how to value it enough. How I will triumph over the Duttons! I do not intend to accept it, at least I believe not… he is quite an old Man, about two and thirty, very plain, so plain that I cannot bear to look at him…

"He has a large fortune …in short, I do not know what to do. If I refuse him, he as good as told me that he should offer himself to Sophia, and if she refused him, to Georgiana, and I could not bear to have either of them married before me…”

What the actress Rebecca Vaughan loves about Austen’s women is that almost 200 years after they were written, they remain as fresh and as real as ever.

“They make you realise that human nature never changes,” she says. “The society around them changes, but our inner thoughts and desires in many ways don’t change.”

So in love was she with Austen – and particularly with Austen’s women – that Rebecca ‘adapted’ a one-woman play by stitching together quotes from some of the writer’s most memorable female characters, and introducing them through the voice of a narrator – a version of Austen herself, the author’s cool, biting voice recreated through passages of narration lifted from the books.

The result is to have Austen herself introduce some of her most unforgettable characters – Emma Woodhouse, Lizzy Bennet, Mrs Norris, Mrs Musgrove, Mary Stanhope and all – and then for them to talk to the audience about love, friendship, scandal, and the miseries of being ill and misunderstood.

Austen’s Women was a sell-out success at Edinburgh in 2009 and again in 2013. And later this month it will be coming to York as part of this year’s York Literature Festival.

Five years on, Rebecca enjoys performing it as much as ever.

She loves stepping into the shoes of Austen’s women, she says – even those of Mrs Norris.

“Whenever I speak her words I can feel the tightness in her chest!” she says. You can almost see her hugging herself with delight at the prospect.

• Austen’s Women at the York Literature Festival. Studio Theatre, York Theatre Royal, Friday March 28, 7.45 pm - 10.30 pm.

Tickts: £12 / £10 concession from York Theatre Royal on 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk