"A real actress": Theatre and selfhood in Antonia White's Frost in may quartet

The novels of British author Antonia White (1899–980) have been mined primarily for themes of psychosis, sexual trauma, and spiritual faith and doubt, whilst simultaneously marginalized as “autobiographical fiction.” This chapter freshly illuminates her work by analysis through the lens of theatre, revealed as a trope shaping the Frost in May quartet: theatre manifests in formal productions and, metaphorically, to express a profoundly unstable sense of self. I argue that theatre's intertwining of supposed “oppositions”—self and role, real and pretended, felt and faked—explains its fascination for the author, synthesizing qualities she found terrifyingly antithetical. White's own encounters with the stage also reflect the changing face of British theatre in the twentieth century: from conservatism to experiment, towards a more holistic model joining realism and abstraction, creativity and technique, corporeality and the text.