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 upon 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.
With:
Miriam F. Hart
Contributions by:
Pierre DuBois,
Kelly M. McDonald,
Danielle Grover
Edited by:
Linda Zionkowski
Imprint: Bucknell University Press,U.S.
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 235mm,
Width: 156mm,
Spine: 23mm
Weight: 472g
ISBN: 9781684485161
ISBN 10: 1684485169
Series: Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 15 January 2024
Recommended Age: From 18 to 99 years
Audience:
General/trade
,
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
ELT Advanced
,
Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Illustrations 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
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.
Reviews for Women and Music in the Age of Austen
“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 “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 “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
