Women and Music in the Age of Austen

Linda Zionkowski and Miriam F. Hart (Eds.)

2023
272 pages
$52.95
ISBN 9781684485154
Transits

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.

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Reviews
"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

About the editors:

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.

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.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $163.00, 9781684485161; EPUB: $52.95, 9781684485178