In Emma, Jane Austen concedes that it may be just possible to live without dancing. "Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months successively, without being at any ball of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind." But what an empty life! For anyone who still has sap in them, there is nothing like dancing – nothing to rival what Austen calls "the felicities of rapid motion". In Austen's fiction, as in many novels of the 19th century, a ball is the ultimate occasion for a heady kind of courtship – a trying out of partners that is exciting, flirtatious and downright erotic.

In Pride and Prejudice, the complicated mutual attraction of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy is established through their behaviour towards each other at a succession of balls. They approach and retreat, tease and repel each other, as in an elaborate dance. Among the many media events marking the bicentenary of the publication of Austen's most popular novel, none is more elaborate than BBC2's restaging of the most important of these, the Netherfield ball given by Mr Bingley. It is a gorgeous, telegenic enactment, but also reveals the conventions on which Austen's narrative relies.

She takes it for granted that all her readers will know what a ball is like and will see the manoeuvres of her characters as clearly as she does herself. She does not tell us what dances were performed, what music was played, or what food was eaten. Yet from other publications of the age – including the copious instructions of contemporary dance masters – it is entirely possible to reconstruct such an event. We are used to the glimpses given in film adaptations, but never have dancers been made to perform exactly as Bingley's guests must have done. "Every savage can dance," observes Mr Darcy sardonically, and when you see it happening in a thronged ballroom you certainly notice the physicality. Individual dances last up to 15 minutes and, in a room lit only by candles, the heat soon rivals any Ibizan dancefloor. The performers are dance students from the University of Surrey, and probably more athletic than the average denizen of Meryton in 1813, but soon the sweat is pouring off them. You begin to feel the force of Austen's observations that, at the earlier assembly ball in Pride and Prejudice, Mr Bingley "danced every dance". He was clearly a thoroughly vigorous young man.



The BBC staging of the Netherfield ball ... click here to view on mobile

In life, Austen loved balls, which were the most exciting events in provincial life. In her novels, she uses them brilliantly for their combination of propriety and passion. Codes of behaviour were exacting. At the Netherfield ball, Elizabeth must dance with Mr Collins because if a woman turns down one request for a dance she must turn down all others. Say no to Mr Collins and you must stand out for the whole evening. Her first two dances (the maximum you were allowed with the same partner) are therefore "dances of mortification". Mr Collins, "often moving wrong without being aware of it", gives her "all the shame and misery which a disagreeable partner for a couple of dances can give". He, of course, thinks that he has done brilliantly, the dance being a preparation for his proposal of marriage the next day.

See what these dances involve close-up and you feel some sympathy for the badly co-ordinated young vicar. The patterns of steps and movements are delightfully complicated, and unimaginable without a great deal of practice. Our rather accomplished dance students were only able to perform the likes of the Boulanger and the Cotillion after long sessions in the studio. You could see that dancing well was a test, and that when Austen's heroines take the floor with the men they love it is in order to perform well together. Even the Bennet girls, whose education was entirely neglected by their mother, would have had lessons. Dancing was indeed one of the "accomplishments" that Mr Darcy solemnly lists during Elizabeth's earlier stay at Netherfield.

In many 19th-century novels, balls are the occasions for the release of passion and libido. In Thackeray's Vanity Fair, the ball in Brussels on the eve of the battle of Waterloo is the occasion for Becky Sharp to flirt mercilessly with her best friend Amelia's husband, George. Amorously intoxicated, he invites her to elope with him. In risqué French fiction a woman risks losing a great deal at a ball. In Maupassant's famous short story "The Necklace", it is all her worldly prospects. In Flaubert's Madame Bovary, the heroine, bored by her new husband, glimpses a more exciting life at the ball given by the Marquis d'Andervilliers. She dances with a viscount and feels, for the first time, the thrill of her own allure. Many of the grandes passions of European fiction were sealed at balls. Where would Tolstoy have been without them? In War and Peace, Prince Andrei is entranced by Natasha when he encounters her at a grand ball. In Anna Karenina, the desolate Kitty knows that Vronsky has fallen for Anna when she sees the two of them dancing together at a ball.

Tolstoy's characters would have been whirling in waltzes. Austen's are performing in more restricted patterns. In her novels, as recent film versions have recognised, a dance was not an opportunity for a couple to spin off à deux. You danced in a group and made a shape together. When her fellow dancers at the Netherfield ball see Elizabeth take the floor with Mr Darcy, they are suitably awed. As she stands opposite him, she reads "in her neighbours' looks" their "amazement". Some of the other young ladies will also have to come into contact with him as they prance and rotate.

Matthew Macfadyen and Keira Knightley take a twirl in Pride and Prejudice. Photograph: The Kobal Collection

The drama of Austen's fiction is shaped around the very protocol of the ball. A man can only ask a woman to dance if he has been formally introduced to her. In Northanger Abbey, Henry Tilney asks the master of ceremonies to introduce him to Catherine Morland. He must already have had his eye on her. When he attends the Meryton assembly ball, Mr Darcy declines to be introduced to any woman in the room. He will dance only with the women he knows, the baleful Bingley sisters. Not only is he too proud to mingle with the vulgar locals, as a rich young man he is also sick of being the target of husband hunters.



The electric relationship between Elizabeth and Mr Darcy is most clearly expressed in dancing, but also in the very business of sizing each other up as possible partners. The first volume of Pride and Prejudice is structured around a series of three balls. At the assembly ball Mr Darcy, with extraordinary rudeness, lets Elizabeth overhear his description of her as "tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me". He is then forced to taste the hubris of this when he offers himself as her dance partner at the Lucases and is turned down. Finally, at the Netherfield ball, he suddenly asks for "her hand" and, "without knowing what she did", she accepts. "Without knowing what she did", indeed, for the ball allows Austen to stage Elizabeth's almost unconscious interest in Mr Darcy.

At the balls in Austen's novels, you can talk during dances, especially those that require some partners to wait while others perform. In Mansfield Park, we can feel the anticlimax when Fanny finally gets to dance with Edmund, the man she loves, and he tells her that he does not want to talk. "You will not want to be talked to. Let us have the luxury of silence". In Pride and Prejudice, of course, Elizabeth and Mr Darcy have their most erotically charged conversation, a kind of verbal fencing match, while they are dancing. "Perhaps by and bye I may observe that private balls are much pleasanter than public ones", is Elizabeth's opening gambit.

While entrance to the Meryton assembly ball was achieved merely by purchasing a ticket, allowing hoi polloi to be present, the Netherfield ball is a private affair, by invitation only. As the BBC re-enactment makes clear, guests should be dazzled. Thus the significance of the food. Chez Bingley, the food would have been to impress as well as sustain. For the programme, food historian Ivan Day prepared the dishes with which Mr Bingley's supercilious sister Caroline would have flaunted the family's wealth and sophistication. These included the white soup that Mr Bingley mentions as an essential element of a ball. A somewhat sickly concoction of veal stock, ground almonds and cream with a dash of booze, its main function seems to have been that it was difficult and expensive to prepare. The incredible spread of mousses and pies, platters of meat and fish (poached sturgeon being the eyecatcher) was to invigorate the dancers for another few hours of gyration.

In Emma, Mrs Weston provokes outrage with her suggestion that, as the room set aside for the ball supper at The Crown is so small, there be "no regular supper; merely sandwiches, &c., set out in the little room". What a "wretched suggestion"! "A private dance, without sitting down to supper, was pronounced an infamous fraud upon the rights of men and women; and Mrs Weston must not speak of it again." The supper came as a kind of half-time break at a proper ball, and in Pride and Prejudice is central to the plot. It is where Mrs Bennet mortifies Elizabeth by talking loudly to Lady Lucas of her eldest daughter's prospects of marrying Mr Bingley ("such a charming young man, and so rich"). She talks so loudly that Mr Darcy can clearly hear her. "Elizabeth blushed and blushed again with shame and vexation."

She cares very much about what Mr Darcy thinks, without quite realising what has gone on as they danced together. For the reader, the intimacy between them has been sealed. How could Elizabeth think Mr Wickham was a likely marriage partner for her when she has not danced with him? All Austen's heroines except Elinor Dashwood dance with the men they love, and all of them have their feelings confirmed by dancing. Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey meets her husband-to-be, Henry Tilney, at a dance. Fanny Price in Mansfield Park experiences true felicity when she dances with Edmund at the ball that Sir Thomas Bertram stages in her honour. Emma Woodhouse first alerts us to the sexual chemistry between herself and Mr Knightley when she dances with him at the ball at the Crown. "We are not really so much brother and sister as to make it at all improper," she observes. His answer makes it clear, to us if not to her, that he is taking to the floor for a reason. "Brother and sister! No, indeed."

Anne Elliot in Persuasion, her chance of happiness with Captain Wentworth apparently lost eight years earlier, seems condemned to a sexless existence, playing the piano for the Musgrove sisters as they dance with the man she loves. But we know that she and Captain Wentworth did used to dance together. She overhears Captain Wentworth asking one of the Musgrove girls "whether Miss Elliot never danced". The reply is heart-sinking. "Oh, no; never; she has quite given up dancing. She had rather play." To dance was to be sexually alive. Couples were performing together, feeling each other's physical proximity (though both men and women wore gloves throughout) and being watched by others. In Mansfield Park Mrs Norris and Mrs Rushworth watch Maria Bertram and Mr Rushworth dancing together and pretend that they look like beautifully suited partners. We must imagine that the clod-hopping Mr Rushworth is nothing of the sort.

The reconstruction of the ball will delight any addict of period costume dazzle. The clothes are sumptuous as well as authentic: they were, after all, designed to attract the eye of the opposite sex. Yet the programme should also show any lover of Austen's novels that dancing was at the heart of her stories. It was all about pairing off. The ball was the occasion for a couple to perform together in front of others. It was their opportunity for physical intimacy. They could not clinch each other or even touch each other's flesh, yet they were brought closer than they could be on any other occasion. And, as Elizabeth and Mr Darcy show us, if they were consummate performers they could talk as they did so. Once these two have danced together, they are destined for each other. Anyone in that ballroom should have been able to see it, even if they did not see it themselves.

• John Mullan is the author of What Matters in Jane Austen: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (Bloomsbury)