Women and Music in the Age of Austen
272 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
8 bw illus., 7 color illus., 1 table
Paperback
Release Date:15 Dec 2023
ISBN:9781684485154
Hardcover
Release Date:15 Dec 2023
ISBN:9781684485161
Women and Music in the Age of Austen
Edited by Linda Zionkowski, with Miriam F. Hart
Bucknell University Press
Women 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.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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.
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.
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.
Throughout this collection, we see women moving across the continuum and the degrees of resistance they encountered: from practicing alone before breakfast, as we know Austen did, through playing as part of a large social event that might also include performances by professional musicians, to appearing on the concert and opera stage and supporting themselves professionally...The scholarly endnotes for each essay and the bibliography provide many fascinating paths for those who wish to explore further.
LINDA ZIONKOWSKI is the Samuel and Susan Crowl Professor of Literature at Ohio University in Athens. She is the author of Men’s Work: Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Poetry, 1660–1784 and Women and Gift Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Richardson, Burney, Austen and coeditor of The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England.
MIRIAM F. HART received her PhD at Ohio University in Athens after twenty years of touring as a singer, recording with the Allman Brothers as well as with her group, The Local Girls. She has performed at the White House, on A Prairie Home Companion, and at numerous musical festivals and venues across the United States. Her dissertation included the first complete photographic archiving of Austen’s songbooks.
MIRIAM F. HART received her PhD at Ohio University in Athens after twenty years of touring as a singer, recording with the Allman Brothers as well as with her group, The Local Girls. She has performed at the White House, on A Prairie Home Companion, and at numerous musical festivals and venues across the United States. Her dissertation included the first complete photographic archiving of Austen’s songbooks.
Illustrations
Table
Acknowledgments
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
Table
Acknowledgments
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
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