Women and Music in the Age of Austen

“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

"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."

~Jane Austen Society of North America News