Description
Book SynopsisWomen and Music in the Age of Austen highlights the central role women played in musical performance, composition, reception, and representation, and analyzes its formative and lasting effect on Georgian culture. This interdisciplinary collection of essays from musicology, literary studies, and gender studies challenges the conventional historical categories that marginalize women’s experience from Austen’s time. Contesting the distinctions between professional and amateur musicians, public and domestic sites of musical production, and performers and composers of music, the contributors reveal how women’s widespread involvement in the Georgian musical scene allowed for self-expression, artistic influence, and access to communities that transcended the boundaries of gender, class, and nationality. This volume’s breadth of focus advances our understanding of a period that witnessed a musical flourishing, much of it animated by female hands and voices.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Trade Review“
Women and Music in the Age of Austen offers an expansive, lively, colourful view of the gendered musical practices of the eighteenth century and the Romantic period. These essays enrich our knowledge of the musical world of Jane Austen and Frances Burney while shining a spotlight on little-known female performers, critics, composers, consumers, collectors, fans, and musical entrepreneurs of the preceding decades.” -- Angela Esterhammer * author of Print and Performance in the 1820s: Improvisation, Speculation, Identity *
“Finding inspiration in a broad range of sources, the volume reflects on women and their musical activities in Georgian England. A focus on Jane Austen and her novels moves in and out of the picture, amplified and receding against historical figures known and unknown. Through these essays by musically-informed literary scholars and musicologists, readers get a sense of the possibilities and desires of women engaged with music over a historical period that brackets the life of our beloved Jane.” -- Maribeth Clark * coeditor of Musicology and Dance: Historical and Critical Perspectives *
“Music was important to Jane Austen, as her novels and letters attest, and women played a hitherto undervalued part in the musical world of her time. This sparkling and substantial collection of interdisciplinary essays illuminates Austen’s fiction and her age in many original and surprising ways.” -- Peter Sabor * coeditor of Jane Austen's Manuscript Works *
Table of ContentsIllustrations
Table
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: “It was all in harmony”: Musical Women in Austen’s Culture
Linda Zionkowski with Miriam F. Hart
Part I: Representing the Female Performer
Chapter 1: A Musical Room of Her Own: Musical Spaces in Jane Austen’s Novels
Pierre Dubois
Chapter 2: “
Prima la musica”: Gentry Daughters at Play in Town, Country, and Continent, 1815-1825
Kelly M. McDonald
Chapter 3: Stage Fright: Female Musicians Crossing Musical Borders in Thicknesse’s
The School for Fashion and Burney’s
The Wanderer Danielle Grover
Part II: Women and the Market in Music
Chapter 4: Women on the Title Page: Celebrity Endorsement of Musical Scores
Penelope Cave
Chapter 5: The Lady’s Choice: Women and the Purchase of Music through Subscription
Simon D. I. Fleming
Chapter 6: Female Musical Entrepreneurship in the Eighteenth Century
Alison C. DeSimone
Part III: Women as Critics and Fans
Chapter 7: Women as Quiet Critics
Jane Girdham
Chapter 8: Femininity and Foreignness in George Colman’s Farce,
The Musical Lady Leslie Ritchie
Chapter 9: Georgian Fangirls: Women and Castrati in Eighteenth-Century London
Jeffrey A. Nigro
Part IV: Women and the Bardic Tradition
Chapter 10: Anna Gordon and the Ballad Collectors
Ruth Perry
Chapter 11: Antiquaries, Female Harpists, and the Survival of the Bardic Tradition
Devon R. Nelson
Part V: Revisiting the Age of Austen
Chapter 12: “That Ecstatic Delight”: Gender and Performance in Adaptations of
Sense and Sensibility Gayle Magee
Chapter 13: “Here’s harmony!”: Music and Gender in Kirke Mechem’s
Pride & Prejudice (2019) and Jonathan Dove’s
Mansfield Park (2011)
Juliette Wells
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
