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Women and Music in the Age of Austen highlights women’s central role in musical performance, composition, reception, and representation, and analyzes their formative and lasting effect upon Georgian culture. This interdisciplinary collection of essays reveals how music allowed for women’s self-expression, artistic influence, and access to communities that transcended the boundaries of gender, class, and nationality.
List of contents
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
About the author
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.
