Women and Music in the Age of Austen

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.  

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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