Women and Music in the Age of Austen

By Miriam F. Hart, Pierre DuBois, Kelly M. McDonald and 11 more

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.


 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781684485178

Book preview

Cover: Women and Music in the Age of Austen edited by Linda Zionkowski and Miriam F. Hart

Women and Music in the Age of Austen

TRANSITS

LITERATURE, THOUGHT & CULTURE, 1650–1850

Series editors:

Miriam L. Wallace, New College of Florida

Mona Narain, Texas Christian University

A landmark series in long-eighteenth-century studies, Transits publishes monographs and edited volumes that are timely, transformative in their approach, and global in their engagement with arts, literature, culture, and history. Books in the series have engaged with visual arts, environment, politics, material culture, travel, theater and performance, embodiment, connections between the natural sciences and medical humanities, writing and book history, sexuality, gender, disability, race, and colonialism from Britain and Europe to the Americas, the Far East, the Middle/Near East, Africa, and Oceania. Works that make provocative connections across time, space, geography, or intellectual history or that develop new modes of critical imagining are particularly welcome.

Recent titles in the series:

Women and Music in the Age of Austen

Linda Zionkowski with Miriam F. Hart, eds.

Teaching the Eighteenth Century Now: Pedagogy as Ethical Engagement

Kate Parker and Miriam L. Wallace, eds.

Louis Sébastien Mercier: Revolution and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Paris

Michael J. Mulryan

Alimentary Orientalism: Britain’s Literary Imagination and the Edible East

Yin Yuan

Thomas Holcroft’s Revolutionary Drama: Reception and Afterlives

Amy Garnai

Families of the Heart: Surrogate Relations in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

Ann Campbell

Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities

Jeremy Chow, ed.

For more information about the series, please visit bucknelluniversitypress.org.

Women and Music in the Age of Austen

Edited by

LINDA ZIONKOWSKI WITH

MIRIAM F. HART

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Zionkowski, Linda, editor. | Hart, Miriam F., editor.

Title: Women and music in the age of Austen / edited by Linda Zionkowski with Miriam F. Hart.

Description: Lewisburg, Pennsylvania : Bucknell University Press, 2023. | Series: Transits: literature, thought & culture, 1650–1850 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023013656 | ISBN 9781684485154 (paperback) | ISBN 9781684485161 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781684485178 (epub) | ISBN 9781684485185 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Women musicians—Great Britain. | Music—Great Britain—18th century—History and criticism. | Women in the music trade—Great Britain—History—18th century. | Music and literature—History—18th century. | Women musicians in literature. | Musicians in literature. | Music in literature.

Classification: LCC ML82 .W633 2023 | DDC 780.82/0941— dc23/eng/20230627

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023013656

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

This collection copyright © 2024 by Bucknell University Press

Individual chapters copyright © 2024 in the names of their authors

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Bucknell University Press, Hildreth-Mirza Hall, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837-2005. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Bucknell University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

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Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction: It Was All in Harmony—Musical Women in Austen’s Culture

LINDA ZIONKOWSKI WITH MIRIAM F. HART

PART ONE: Representing the Female Performer

1 A Musical Room of Her Own: Musical Spaces in Jane Austen’s Novels

PIERRE DUBOIS

2 Prima La Musica: Gentry Daughters at Play in Town, Country, and Continent, 1815–1825

KELLY M. MCDONALD

3 Stage Fright: Female Musicians Crossing Musical Borders in Thicknesse’s The School for Fashion and Burney’s The Wanderer

DANIELLE GROVER

PART TWO: Women and the Market in Music

4 Women on the Title Page: Celebrity Endorsement of Musical Scores

PENELOPE CAVE

5 The Lady’s Choice: Women and the Purchase of Music through Subscription

SIMON D. I. FLEMING

6 Female Musical Entrepreneurship in the Eighteenth Century

ALISON C. DESIMONE

PART THREE: Women as Critics and Fans

7 Women as Quiet Critics

JANE GIRDHAM

8 Femininity and Foreignness in George Colman’s Farce The Musical Lady

LESLIE RITCHIE

9 Georgian Fangirls: Women and Castrati in Eighteenth-Century London

JEFFREY A. NIGRO

PART FOUR: Women and the Bardic Tradition

10 Anna Gordon and the Ballad Collectors

RUTH PERRY

11 Antiquaries, Female Harpists, and the Survival of the Bardic Tradition

DEVON R. NELSON

PART FIVE: Revisiting the Age of Austen

12 That Ecstatic Delight: Gender and Performance in Adaptations of Sense and Sensibility

GAYLE MAGEE

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

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

Figure 2.1 Genoa, drawn by Samuel Prout from a sketch by Mrs. Edward Austen (Emma Smith, ca. 1822) and engraved by Edward Finden. Brockedon’s Road Book, from London to Naples (London, 1835)

Figure 3.1 Thomas Gainsborough, Ann Ford (later Mrs. Philip Thicknesse), 1760

Figure 4.1 Angelica Catalani as Semiramis in the opera La morte di Semiramide. Colored engraving, 1818

Figure 4.2 Page 3 of Made. Catalani’s celebrated Song Nel cor più non mi sento, with her graces and embellishments (London: Clementi, Banger, Collard, Davis and Collard, ca. 1815)

Figure 4.3 The title page of J. L. Dussek’s much admired concerto for the harp composed for Madame Dussek, arranged to be played without accompaniments by S. Dussek-Moralt (London, ca. 1813)

Figure 5.1 The percentage by gender of subscribers to keyboard sonatas, by the number of accompanying parts

Figure 5.2 The counts of subscriptions to Theophania Cecil’s Twelve Voluntaries (1809), by title

Figure 5.3 Theophania Cecil, voluntary 1 from Twelve Voluntaries (1809), bars 84–106

Figure 5.4 The counts of subscriptions to Theophania Cecil’s The Psalm and Hymn Tunes, used at St John’s Chapel, Bedford Row (1814), by title

Figure 8.1 A Favourite Song. Sung by Miss Pope, in the Musical Lady, 1773

Figure 11.1 Frances Tayler, Pembrokeshire March, in Musical Miscellany Consisting of Pastorales, Notturnos, Military Airs, and Sonatas, edited by Edward Jones (ca. 1805)

Figure 11.2 The Last Invasion Embroidered Tapestry (1996), designed by Elizabeth Cramp, RWS

Figure 11.3 The Bard, frontispiece of Edward Jones, ed., Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards (1784)

Figure 11.4 Engraving of the Theban harp in Charles Burney’s General History of Music, vol. 1 (1776)

Figure 11.5 Woman’s body on a harp on the title page of Edward Jones, ed., A Miscellaneous Collection of French and Italian Ariettas (1785)

TABLE

Table 5.1 The number and percentage of subscribers by gender to musical works produced by female composers

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this book took shape over many years and through many conversations about music in Jane Austen’s fiction. Our perspective arose from shared experience in both literary studies and musical performance, and working together brought us a stronger sense of the profound connections among reading, writing, playing, and singing. Austen’s constant pairing of novels and music led us to broad questions about how women formed the musical culture of her time; through this collection of essays, we hope to show the extent of their participation and the range of their influence—an impact that lasted throughout the Georgian period and beyond.

Many friends and colleagues have helped us bring this project to light. We owe our deepest appreciation and gratitude to our contributors, all of whom devoted their time and expertise to this volume, not to mention their patience through several pandemic-related delays. Their scholarship has been a constant source of discovery and pleasure for us. Over the years, we have also received support, encouragement, and helpful suggestions from Susan Allen Ford, Marilyn Francus, Loreen Giese, Park Honan, Barry Roth, B. C. Southam, Robert Wallace, and Howard Weinbrot. We regret that some of these friends can no longer receive the thanks and recognition they so deserve. Finally, we appreciate the comments and advice from our anonymous readers at Bucknell; their careful attention to our manuscript no doubt improved it greatly, as did the expert guidance provided by Bucknell’s editors, Suzanne Guiod and Pam Dailey.

As always, we reserve our deepest thanks for those music lovers in our lives: Adam Baker, whose knowledge of Handel and Haydn continues to surprise us; Gillian Baker, whose more contemporary playlist teaches us to listen in new ways; Lester Marks, whose constant support and encouragement sustained us throughout this project; and our extended families, who inspired many generations to explore and enjoy music.

ABBREVIATIONS

E Jane Austen, Emma, edited by Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Letters Jane Austen’s Letters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)

MP Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, edited by John Wiltshire, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

P Jane Austen, Persuasion, edited by Janet Todd and Antje Blank, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)

P&P Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, edited by Pat Rogers, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)

S&S Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, edited by Edward Copeland, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Women and Music in the Age of Austen

INTRODUCTION

It Was All in Harmony—Musical Women in Austen’s Culture

LINDA ZIONKOWSKI WITH MIRIAM F. HART

AS LATE AS 1991, VISITORS to Jane Austen’s final home, Chawton Cottage, could view the author’s books of printed and manuscript music on display. On her pianoforte and on the desk in the parlor, they lay open to sight and touch and exposed to the damaging effects of humidity, sunlight, and dust. Fascinating as it might have been to view the books in the place where Austen would have played their music, their being so accessible—and so vulnerable—also reflected the comparatively lower value placed on these often hand-copied sheets: all of Austen’s other manuscript writings had long been carefully preserved in libraries, museums, and private collections. But for many years, the songbooks, unlike Austen’s fiction, seem to have served a primarily ornamental function as a supplemental artifact of material history: the basis for domestic music, they helped to re-create visually the tableau of Austen’s everyday life, but their significance within her social world remained unexamined.

Growing awareness of women’s contributions to the musical culture of Georgian Britain raised the status and preserved the substance of the songbooks.¹ In 1996, Miriam F. Hart arranged for the professional photographing of the eight volumes held at Jane Austen’s House Museum. These music books, along with ten other printed and manuscript volumes that belonged to members of the Austen family, were categorized, conserved, and digitized in 2013–2015 by a team of scholars and librarians at the University of Southampton and have been made available for public view and study.² Ranging in date from the 1750s to 1825 and designed to be performed by the Austen women and their relations for the entertainment of their families, friends, and neighbors, this collection of music apparently confirms the conventions of domestic artistry articulated throughout conduct literature of this period. The songbooks are matrilineal, creating and maintaining social bonds among generations of musical women and their extended kin networks.³ The music itself—ranging from song ballads (the most popular) and country dances to keyboard sonatas and selections from Italian opera—required significant leisure to practice and transcribe and sufficient money to purchase, thereby establishing the gentility of the performers.⁴ Finally, the instruments featured in the songbooks emphasized the principal role of women in family music: although some pieces were written for the harp, harpsichord and later pianoforte were dominant, with occasional flute or violin accompaniment most likely provided by men.⁵

A DOMESTIC OCCUPATION

The style of female musicianship emerging from the Austen family songbooks appears comfortably in line with contemporary norms of genteel femininity, and her fiction both acknowledges and satirizes her culture’s idea of music as a safe domestic occupation for women.⁶ In the words of Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park, having musical daughters in a family, like having a beautiful one, had become a regular thing in Austen’s culture: Two play on the piano-forte, and one on the harp—and all sing—or would sing if they were taught—or sing all the better for not being taught—or something like it (335). A skilled harpist herself, Mary recognizes the ubiquity of musical instruction in genteel families, or those aspiring to genteel status; as Kelly M. McDonald maintains, singing at the piano was a sanctioned, almost a required ‘accomplishment’ whose absence would be a conspicuous sign of incapacity or neglect.⁷ Mary’s link between female beauty and music also underscores music’s role as a constituent (and expected) component of polite women’s sexual value in competition for marriage partners. The antiheroine of Austen’s novel, Mary is not above deploying music to attract a suitor, and the narrator wryly observes that her good looks, wit, and harp playing were enough to catch any man’s heart (MP, 76).

Given the influence—or sexual power—that women like Mary Crawford were believed to wield through music, Austen’s contemporaries maintained a conflicted attitude toward female musicianship, even when practice and performance were confined to the home. Conduct books reveal this tension explicitly in their fretful attempts to determine music’s role for young women in genteel life, especially since domestic music-making became an increasingly gendered activity: music theory, not performance, featured in the liberal education for gentlemen, and even Charles Burney, whose income in part derived from giving lessons, gained cultural prominence not for his technical proficiency but from his work as a music historian and composer.⁸ As Ruth Perry reminds us, the cultural identification of music performance as an artisanal skill still prevailed, and the ability to play [appeared] as a menial rather than an exalted endeavour.⁹ Even for genteel women, whose status-defining activities—drawing, dancing, needlework—were associated with physical dexterity, music seemed particularly suspect. Writing in 1773, Hester Chapone described music as one of the accomplishments that fill time agreeably and make a young woman a desirable companion, but in the same paragraph warned her readers against taking this occupation too seriously: It is but seldom that a private person has leisure or application enough to gain any high degree of excellence … and your own partial family are perhaps the only persons who would not much rather be entertained by the performance of a professor than by yours.¹⁰ In Letters on Education (1790), Catherine Macaulay agrees that music benefits women in getting rid of time, yet worries that playing and singing also degrade women to the objects of male sensual pleasure, making them equally capable of captivating, by their accomplishments, the eastern despot, or the European fine gentleman.¹¹

The most serious critique of female musicians is that they threatened the patriarchal household by diverting attention from caregiving tasks in favor of nurturing their individual talent—an expense of self-directed energy that apparently subverted women’s dedication to the service of others. Hannah More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799) bluntly calculates the time wasted on the phrenzy of accomplishments: she estimates that by practicing 4 hours per day from age six to eighteen, a young woman would spend roughly 14,400 hours on music, after which more of her time might be lost in displaying her proficiency.¹² Through her portrayals of female characters ruined by immersion in music, More tried to impede her culture’s domestication of virtuosity—Gillen D’Arcy Wood’s term for the technical excellence bordering on automatism developed by hours of practice and application.¹³ Wary of even the most cursory musical instruction, More created a heroine, Lucilla Stanley in Coelebs in Search of a Wife, who (incredibly) has a correct ear [but] neither sings nor plays.¹⁴

The contradictory advice that Georgian women received regarding music—it was both useful and trivial, pleasing and dangerous, praiseworthy and ridiculous—was reflected in contemporary visual portrayals of female musicians. Popular satiric images by Thomas Rowlandson, James Gillray, Charles Williams, and Isaac Cruikshank suggest ingrained cultural disapproval of female involvement in music: featuring women contorting themselves at the harp and piano for the pleasure of their foolish or designing male admirers, these satires dismissed the social value of music altogether. Such attacks on music as promoting luxury and corrupting manners had a nationalistic component as well, for representing the English as unmusical could be as implicitly boastful as it was self-deprecating.¹⁵ Even approving depictions of female musicianship emphasized the regulation of genteel women’s conduct rather than the development of their talent. As Richard Leppert points out, visual art foregrounded the connection between music and domesticity, with female musicians portrayed as primarily decorative, surrounded by male family members and reflective of the affluence, social status, and aesthetic refinement of their kin; in these images, instruments (usually keyboard) most often served as musical props, and women’s musicality—their ability to play and sing—was subordinated to their function as ornamental consumers of family wealth.¹⁶ Yet although ideologically powerful, both satirical and admiring depictions of musical women could not successfully dictate the actual practice of female musicians and those who supported them, even in domestic life. Rather, the variety and range of women’s experiences suggest their rejection of confinement to a narrowly limited role.

WE WILL HAVE A PIANOFORTE

Austen’s experience reveals how the growing commercial market in musical instruments, scores, and instruction both reinforced and challenged conventional conceptions of women’s engagement with music. The daughter of a country clergyman, she was unusual in receiving weekly instruction from George William Chard, the organist of Winchester Cathedral, until at least her early twenties—which was long past the time usually allotted for female accomplishments. Austen also owned or rented a pianoforte throughout her life, with the exception of five years spent in Bath, and proved familiar with the composers and styles of music fashionable in her culture. With families like Austen’s willing to underwrite the expenses, the Georgian period experienced a swell in the manufacture and rental of keyboard instruments, principally the harpsichord and, later, the pianoforte. Burkat Shudi (1702–1773), a Swiss immigrant, and Jacob Kirkman (1710–1792), an immigrant from Austria, were the leading producers of harpsichords, with Shudi’s instruments numbering at least 1,115 and Kirkman’s around 2,000 before 1800. The price of harpsichords varied according to the complexity of the instrument, ranging from £36 15s. to £52 10s. for single-manual models to £84 for double-manual ones (which included the Venetian swell device that Shudi invented).¹⁷ Although harpsichords remained fairly popular throughout the eighteenth century—Kirkman continued to manufacture them until 1809—the pianoforte, first made in England by German immigrant Johannes Zumpe in the 1760s, became the domestic instrument of choice by the 1790s.¹⁸ Innovations to the instrument increasing its tonal range and resonance were introduced by John Broadwood (who joined Shudi’s firm and married his daughter) starting in the 1770s; between 1780 and 1800, Broadwood and his son James had manufactured around six thousand square and one thousand grand pianofortes, at a cost ranging from about £21 for a plain square model to £28 7s. for a more elaborate square upright and £73 10s. for a large horizontal grand.¹⁹ Secondhand and rented keyboard instruments made music more accessible for women with limited means but with a desire to play. Austen’s family sold her pianoforte before moving to Bath in 1801, and she felt this loss keenly: as Mary Burgan remarks, Without a piano, women with pretensions to gentility are deprived of the exercise of their special training, of any leading role in family recreation, and of one of their few legitimate channels for self-expression.²⁰ Austen later rented a pianoforte when she lived in lodgings at Southampton and purchased a good used instrument for the considerable sum of thirty guineas when she finally moved to Chawton Cottage; declaring to her sister Cassandra that we will have a Pianoforte, Austen did not let straitened finances deter her from finding the means to play, and her family obviously supported her musical life.²¹ Increasingly associated with homebred pleasures, the pianoforte (later abbreviated to piano) held pride of place in domestic music-making: Pierre Dubois notes that its capacity for expressing a range of tones made the pianoforte the perfect vehicle for the new ‘sentimental’ sensibility valued in British culture at the time.²² But the resources invested in purchasing and playing this instrument also suggest that women practiced with serious effort and that their commitment to music was not easily bounded by discourse regarding conventionally feminine accomplishments.

Like the pianoforte, the harp (Mary Crawford’s instrument of choice) was associated with a culturally approved form of gendered subjectivity. Introduced to Britain and popularized by French émigrés such as Anne-Marie Krumpholtz—who composed music and played onstage—the harp enabled both the expression and modulation of sound effects through touch; played principally by women, it also focused attention on the graceful movement of the player’s hands and arms, giving an impression of softness and charm that could easily be subsumed within an image of femininity.²³ Conduct books emphasized the visual along with the aural effects of women’s music, advising those playing the harp to observe an elegant flow of figure … as the shape of the instrument is calculated, in every respect, to show a fine figure to advantage.²⁴ Despite this approval for the instrument, Jeffrey A. Nigro observes that the harp in the late Georgian period was a complex cultural object infused with contradictory meanings invoking both romantic ‘primitivism’ and urbane sophistication. Developments in design implemented by Sébastien Érard, who left France during the Reign of Terror, dramatically expanded the harp’s tonal range, and a profusion of music written for the instrument followed.²⁵ British audiences, however, often viewed the harp with ambivalence, associating it with the simplicity of ancient Celtic societies as well as the dangerous eroticism of French culture. The prominent display of the player’s body evoked this anxiety. For Georgian women, the physicality of making music was as culturally meaningful as the music they produced, since the sight of a body disciplined to appropriately feminine forms of self-carriage was a necessary accompaniment to the sounds the musician was trained to produce: Austen’s narrator notes that Mary Crawford’s harp, as elegant as herself (MP, 76), mirrors the body of its owner as its sound seduces the male listener.

Although proficiency at the harp might have been beyond the reach of women less wealthy than Mary, those without access to formal instruction could rely on the marketplace for assistance in learning music: musical lesson books, which grew especially popular in the later eighteenth century, made playing an instrument (usually keyboard) possible and also enabled women to teach their family members at home. Austen herself recommended lesson books for those who did not have teachers available. Skeptical of music masters who she believed were given too much consequence (Letters, 316), she helped purchase training manuals for keyboard and might also have played from these manuals: an especially popular text for women beginning their musical instruction was James Hook’s Guida di Musica; being a Complete Book of Instructions for Beginners on the Harpsichord or Piano Forte, first published in 1785.²⁶ Instruction could be passed from player to player as well: one of the Austen family songbooks bearing the signature of Austen’s sister Cassandra on the flyleaf contains detailed printed instructions on musical notations, keeping time, keyboard fingering, and major and minor scales, as well as lessons for practice. Aware of the discipline involved in self-study, Austen gently mocked domestic players unmotivated to improve their skills, inscribing the title page of another book as Juvenile Songs & Lessons for young beginners who don’t know enough to practice.²⁷ Through guides and lesson books, musical instruction was available, if not always diligently pursued.

Like Austen, women genuinely interested in playing and singing could acquire a great variety of music for their use, including texts produced commercially as well as hand copied. The early eighteenth century saw a remarkable expansion in printed music, most of which was intended for amateurs at home; this trend appears in the prolific output of John Walsh, who published music by English and foreign composers, including (after 1711) the works of George Frideric Handel. Musical pieces also appeared in supplements to widely read literary journals such as the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731) and the London Magazine (1732), yet the distinctly gendered nature of domestic keyboard playing became apparent at this time as well: early printed collections designed specifically for women on the harpsichord included The Lady’s Banquet, published by Walsh in three volumes from 1704 to 1720 and later in six volumes from 1730 to 1735.²⁸ Music and occasionally instruments also became available for borrowing through circulating libraries, such as those of Samuel Fancourt in London (established in 1748), James Sanders in Derby (1770), and Samuel Silver in Ramsgate (1787); London and large urban areas throughout Britain, including Edinburgh and Dublin, even possessed libraries specifically dedicated to lending music, although the booksellers who often operated them were intent on selling the most fashionable single pieces.²⁹ As the century progressed, the number of music publishers increased. Operating principally in London and often throughout several decades, firms such as Longman (later Longman and Broderip, succeeded by Broderip and Wilkinson) show the strong continued demand for this commodity as well as the growing prominence of women as domestic musicians. The Longman and Broderip catalog for 1789 lists 1,664 musical pieces, 988 of which could be performed only with access to a harpsichord or pianoforte.³⁰ Stanley Sadie notes that selections for keyboard usually dominated these catalogs, ranging from popular and fairly uncomplicated dances, marches, rondos, battle pieces, and melodies based on folk or pseudo-folk music (ostensibly related to Scotland, Ireland, and Wales) to solo sonatas and the accompanied keyboard sonata ("the late eighteenth-century form par excellence"), most often featuring a woman at the piano supported by a male musician on the violin.³¹ In part because of an expanding commercial market in keyboard music, domestic performance had become a female-focused activity.

ELOQUENCE LIES IN HER FINGERS

Women’s experience in Austen’s extended family reveals how gender-determined responsibilities shaped their relation to music. While the Austen songbooks contain every musical genre except the symphony and while the choice of composers—Thomas Arne, Charles Dibdin, Handel, Frantisek Kotzwara, Ignaz Pleyel, William Shield, Daniel Steibelt—suggests a range of musical styles and languages, the contents were fairly common to family collections.³² The selections’ uniqueness and virtuosity, however, proved secondary to the communal and educational function of the music. Austen’s sister-in-law Elizabeth Bridges Knight (wife of Edward Austen Knight), whose songbooks form part of the Austen collection, received her education at an exclusive London boarding school catering to the nobility and gentry. As Kathryn L. Libin notes, her choice of music indicates both her elite tastes, featuring solo keyboard pieces and selections from Italian operas performed in London in the decade before and after her marriage in 1791, and later, her role as a mother, with the inclusion of arrangements of popular nursery rhymes: That this entire album is devoted to vocal music with piano accompaniment aptly reflects the change in [Elizabeth’s] life, which would no longer afford opportunity for solitary keyboard practice, but would require much drawing room entertainment and schoolroom instruction.³³ Similarly, the manuscript music copied by Austen herself—nearly 750 pages—reveals her awareness and endorsement of the social bonds created by playing and singing. The music in a songbook dated from around 1790–1805, primarily in Austen’s hand and mostly designed for keyboard (CHWJA/19/3), features selections that would appeal to a variety of family members, including patriotic songs (Dibdin’s The Soldier’s Adieu, which Austen modified to The Sailor’s Adieu in honor of her naval brothers); comic opera songs (Sweet Transports Gentle Wishes Go in Vain, from Shield’s Rosina); catches (Joan Said to John); marches (The Marseilles March); and duets (Stephen Storace’s Of Plighted Faith).

Yet if domestic musicians like Austen employed their skills mostly for family entertainment, their role did not preclude them from wielding a deep and lasting effect on the musical expression of their time: through playing and singing at home, women selected the music that typified a particular cultural period, encouraged an aesthetic appreciation of this material, and integrated this aesthetic into the lives of succeeding generations. Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh and his younger sister Caroline lovingly remembered their aunt’s music and lyrics well into their advanced age and long after the simple old songs had disappeared from the repertoire of their own Victorian culture: the sound of her piano and voice that reverberated throughout their childhood shaped their recollection of the security, affection, and perfect harmony existing in the Austen household.³⁴ Through their effect on the bodies and minds of hearers, female musicians—most of whom played and sang at home—were able to enrich and alter the cumulative culture of their social world.³⁵ As Austen noted of a verbally reticent young pianist, eloquence lies in her fingers; music gave genteel women a vehicle for the kind of self-expression and influence that might otherwise be denied to them.³⁶

The Austen family’s sharing of printed and manuscript music, advice on instruction, and investments in instruments for those who played seem to contradict the fears expressed in conduct books and fiction of the period: rather than regarding music as a field of competition in which excellence improves their status and perhaps marriage prospects, women, along with their networks of family and friends, found in music the opportunity for social cohesion that transcended generations. As Wood observes, Collaboration, not competitiveness, might be considered the hallmark of Georgian women’s music culture.³⁷ This collaboration among musicians also extended beyond the domestic circle, challenging the ideological barriers separating private from public settings for musical activity. In her influential concept of a performative continuum, Leslie Ritchie maintains that socially acceptable venues for women’s musical performances ranged over a broad spectrum from intimate family gatherings to ticketed concerts in ecclesiastical, recreational, and theatrical spaces.³⁸ Within this continuum, however, there also existed a network of interactions among musicians that complicated the very distinction between amateur and professional.

BRINGING UP FOR THE PUBLIC LINE

Although the hero of Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814) reacts with alarm when his beloved decides to play the harp at her own benefit concert, his response appears unreasonable and reactionary in light of the diverse musical activities that flourished in Burney’s culture.³⁹ Musical women of all backgrounds mingled in Charles Burney’s own household: his family enjoyed evening parties and impromptu concerts with female singers ranging from the celebrated Italian soprano Lucrezia Agujari (Such a powerful voice!—so astonishing a Compass) to women such as Louisa Margaret Harris, a scholar of opera composer Antonio Sacchini, and Anne Brudenell (née Legge), an aristocratic pupil of soprano Regina Mingotti. Harris and Brudenell each "acquired a name as a lady singer and, just like their teachers, enjoyed the esteem that derived from displays of their talent.⁴⁰ A singer who shifted between the designations of paid professional and lady amateur was Elizabeth Linley, whose voice, face, and figure Frances Burney admired extensively: The Town in general give her the preference to any other. Perhaps, except the divine [Giuseppe] Millico, I would rather hear her (if I also saw her) than I would any other.⁴¹ Like many women who performed professionally for pay, Linley was raised and trained in a family of musicians. Although her talent and popularity earned her hundreds of pounds per engagement, her marriage to Richard Brinsley Sheridan in 1773 effectively ended her professional career, as Sheridan believed her performances detracted from the genteel status that he eagerly cultivated. Sheridan’s high-handed behavior, though, provoked the general conversation and censure of his contemporaries, who apparently believed that Linley’s occupation was in no way inherently degrading to her or her husband, especially given his own relatively modest social origins.⁴² To Frances Burney, the fact that Linley sang professionally had no bearing on her modest & unassuming" character: conventional femininity was entirely congruent with a public musical career.⁴³

Whether or not they earned a living from their talent, performing for their socially influential acquaintances enhanced the reputation of all female musicians: the women sought social recognition—the cultural capital that attends having a name—from displaying their abilities to those with a reputation for musical knowledge or training. For performances at their home, Charles Burney’s eldest daughter, Esther, and her husband, Charles Rousseau Burney, provided accompaniment on the family harpsichord commissioned from Jean-Joseph Merlin. An accomplished student of her father, Esther was called on to play the harpsichord frequently, both to provide music for visiting performers and to display her father’s talents as an instructor and composer; her husband joined her in duets that often featured his father-in-law’s music, which, Frances Burney notes, they took pains to play especially well.⁴⁴ Despite The Wanderer’s insistence on the clear demarcation of domestic from public performance for genteel women, the experience of Burney’s family and network of connections suggests the difficulty of distinguishing these sites: in the Burney home, the social enjoyment of playing and singing blended with the cultural and commercial advantage derived from exhibiting one’s skill, thus blurring the boundaries endorsed by Burney’s own fictional characters.

A musical party hosted by Eliza de Feuillide (née Elizabeth Hancock), Austen’s cousin and later sister-in-law, also illustrates the variety of occasions challenging the distinction between professional and domestic musicians. The beneficiary of a trust created for her by Warren Hastings (who lived in the British community at Calcutta with her father, Tysoe Saul Hancock, and her mother, Philadelphia Austen Hancock), Eliza received an education that included extensive instruction on the keyboard and harp as well as vocal training; her music in the Austen family collection, most of it published in France, indicates a level of technical expertise on both instruments clearly superior to that of the other women who owned or played from the music books.⁴⁵ In 1797, Austen’s younger brother Henry married the widowed Eliza (whose husband, Count Jean François Capot de Feuillide, fell victim to the French Revolution); after the couple settled in London, their Sloane Street home became a fashionable gathering place. Although the household owned a harp and pianoforte, Eliza’s musical interests extended beyond domestic performance to providing a venue in which musicians of different backgrounds and capacities could interact. Visiting the couple in April 1811, Austen recorded her impression of a lively musical soirée hosting sixty-six guests and conspicuous enough to be mentioned in the Morning Post. Besides several popular glees, the music included Lessons on the Harp, or Harp & Piano Forte together; the five male and female performers bringing up for the Public Line were supposed to be joined by musical guests, but the professionals’ talent might have proved intimidating. As Austen records with disappointment, No Amateur could be persuaded to do anything (Letters, 191). A shared knowledge of music enabled the crossing of social barriers between the professional entertainers and the genteel musicians who were expected, even urged to take part in the concert; this scenario was common enough that the guests’ reluctance to participate appeared to Austen most likely a failure of nerve—a regrettably missed opportunity for the creation of musical community.

Community could also develop among female musicians who did not perform together. Women with concert or stage careers introduced and popularized musical pieces that domestic musicians integrated into their household repertoire for family and friends; songbooks in the possession of the Austen family feature pieces associated with prominent female singers and actors, many of whom were linked to the composers Arne and Dibdin. Included are James Hook’s The Wedding Day (CHWA/19/3) and Dibdin’s Poor Orra Tink of Yanko Dear (CHWA/19/7), sung by contralto Margaret Kennedy, who specialized in male roles; Arne’s Nymphs and Shepherds (CHWA/19/7), sung by soprano Charlotte Brent, who had a leading role in Arne’s popular Thomas and Sally; Samuel Arnold’s The Poor Little Gypsy, sung by mezzo-soprano Maria Bland, who had a long engagement with Drury Lane Theatre; and Thomas Cooke’s Nobody Coming to Marry Me, a ballad sung by Dorothea Jordan with unbounded Applause at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane (Jenkyns 05). Selections by female composers appear in the music books as well, ranging from single works by genteel musicians such as Miss Mellish’s My Phillida (CHWJA/19/3), Lady Caroline Lee’s The Glouchester Waltz (CHWJA/19/2), and Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire’s I Have a Silent Sorrow Here (CHWJA/19/7) to Sonatas for the Harpsichord or Piano Forte (CHWJA/19/6) by Maria Hester (Reynolds) Park, an instrumentalist and composer whose work was published extensively. Despite the social distance between them, women who earned a living by providing entertainment and those who played and sang as amateurs shared, through music, a unique form of interaction, with drawing rooms echoing the work performed in concert or onstage.

Examining women’s activity as performers, purchasers, collectors, promoters, and critics of music, the essays in this collection reconstruct the variety and complexity of women’s engagement in their contemporary musical scene, revealing how their participation shaped Georgian culture and continues to influence our perception of this period. The first part of this volume, Representing the Female Performer, examines portrayals of female musicians in both fiction and life writing; the fact that women performing music is a prominent theme in written accounts of their experience suggests the importance of this cultural phenomenon as well as the social anxieties it raised. In his study of musical spaces in Austen’s fiction, Pierre Dubois argues that these interludes remain purposely obscure and private: rather than being a vehicle for personal display or self-assertion, music, for Austen’s heroines, provides a refuge from social pressures and a welcome place of separateness in which they can explore their emotional and psychological states. The novels themselves focus not on the virtuosity of the players but on the private moments of solace, peace, and refuge they construct through their music. Dubois notes that with the exception of Johann Baptist Cramer in Emma, composers are not mentioned in Austen’s novels: readers never know the music the female characters play but can only receive a sense of it from joining these characters in the virtual musical space that they create through their performances. Their music, then, is indistinguishable from their inmost sense of self—a subjectivity that, for Austen, is ultimately (and rightly) inaccessible.

Investigating the diaries and letters concerning Augusta and Emma Smith, two daughters of a wealthy, well-connected Essex family, Kelly M. McDonald reveals a more visible role for women in the musical culture of the Regency. The young women were encouraged to achieve high levels of skill through extensive training: Augusta, the eldest, took voice lessons and played the organ (unusually, the family installed one of these instruments at home), pianoforte, flageolet, and cello. Accounts of their education record Augusta and Emma practicing music several hours per day, yet in contrast to the conservative ideology of conduct books, the Smith sisters suffered no detriment from their application. The young women played and sang in the company of their relations and family acquaintances, and as McDonald argues, their music fostered domestic cohesion not only by providing entertainment but also by creating lasting ties among numerous people with shared interests and talents. Their wealth and status also offered the Smith sisters less conventional musical opportunities, including lessons from and performances alongside eminent musicians of their time such as the tenor Thomas Vaughan and violinist François Cramer (brother of Johann Baptist, who also taught). Most