Jane Austen’s music: the world at home

Blog series Music

Author Professor Jeanice Brooks, University of Southampton

The home is a stage for human drama in Jane Austen’s fiction, with young women firmly in the spotlight. This is especially clear in episodes where female musicians exercise their skills: whether it is Marianne Dashwood casting pearls before swine in Sense and Sensibility, the Bingley sisters showing off their fancy education in Pride and Prejudice, or Anne Elliot weeping at the piano in Persuasion, young women at music provided an infinitely productive stimulus for Austen’s imagination.

Musical scenes not only gave Austen scope to develop plot and character. They also evoke gendered themes that sparked fierce debates in her time. Music figured among the genteel occupations often called ‘accomplishments’ in the period’s abundant literature on women’s conduct. 

The prominence of 18th-century debates on the accomplishments means it can be tempting to reproduce their terms, for example by considering music as a polite but trivial pastime, or as a mode of attracting a suitor. But Austen’s musical world was richer than a narrow focus on the accomplishments suggests.

Letters and family memoirs show that alongside her work as a writer she played, sang, and copied music throughout her life. She attended balls, assemblies, concerts and musical theatre, experiencing the explosion of public musical entertainment Georgian England had to offer.

Musical scenes are everywhere in Austen’s fiction, but she specifically names only one composer (Johann Baptist Cramer) and one piece (the traditional Irish song ‘Robin Adair').

Both appear in a virtuosic single scene in Emma. Here the rash Frank Churchill’s gift of an expensive Broadwood piano and some sheet music to Jane Fairfax, to whom he is secretly engaged, allows him to misdirect Emma while exchanging covert musical messages with Jane.

Austen’s family music books preserve at least some of the other pieces she knew and performed, containing music from her earliest childhood through to the years of her final novels. They furnish a vivid picture of English musical culture in the late 18th century and suggest the musical knowledge her own contemporaries brought to reading her work. 

Austen’s life in music

Austen first began learning music aged 7 or 8, the age Catherine Morland begins her own lessons in Northanger Abbey. But while Catherine is relieved to abandon her study, Austen herself (described by her niece as having ‘a natural taste’ for music) kept it up, and her family later purchased a square piano by Christophe Ganer for her use. 

By the mid-1790s, at the time she began the first versions of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, she was taking lessons from the Winchester organist George Chard.

Like many young women, she kept manuscript copybooks in which she entered favourite pieces obtained from friends and relatives. She also purchased printed sheet music, produced in abundance by London publishers and distributed through provincial networks of music teachers and stationers. Separate items of sheet music were then bound up in volumes that are the printed equivalent of a personal playlist.

Austen participated in family amateur theatricals, and she was a keen theatregoer in London and elsewhere. The timing and control of entrances and exits in her fiction reflect her experience of drama, and the comic plays she enjoyed – nearly all containing musical numbers – shaped her use of satire.

Much of her musical repertoire was drawn from popular stage works, encouraging her to bring theatrical characters to life herself. Her niece Caroline remembered Austen frequently singing Michael Kelly’s popular ‘No, my love, no’ at her home in Chawton, Hampshire during the years she published her early novels and drafted later works.

This ballad, set to words by Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis, was part of Thomas Dibdin’s farce Of Age To-morrow, which Austen saw in 1807 when living in Southampton. As a separately published piece of sheet music, the song circulated widely, and as Kelly himself put it in his memoirs, ‘was very productive to the treasury, at little or no expense.’

Austen’s music also inspired imaginary travel far beyond the counties in southern England where she spent her life. Like almost all domestic music collections both north and south of the border, the Austen family’s books are full of Scottish song and dance, and Jane herself owned two entire volumes of Robert Bremner’s enormously popular sets of Scots songs.

Their distinctive Scots dialect and Celtic-flavoured melodies – with their 'Scotch snap’ dotted rhythms, modal inflections, and triadic leaps – allowed Austen to embody forms of Scottishness in performance. This music constructed a Romantic Scotland centred on Highland traditions, and mediated Austen’s engagement with literary Romanticism.

For example, Austen copied and sang a setting of Robert Burns’s nationalistic love song, 'Their groves o’ sweet myrtle’ in her Chawton home at precisely the time she was writing about Burns’s work in her last unfinished novel, Sanditon. The close reading entailed in copying and performing this piece allowed her to temporarily assume Burns’s own voice and imaginatively occupy its masculine narrative stance – a stance she then astutely picked apart in Sanditon.

At home in the world

If Scottish music brought faraway parts of Britain into Austen’s home, repertoire from the Continent imbued it with international musical styles. England was a magnet for Continental musicians as the rapid growth of its cities created new opportunities for composition, performance, teaching, and instrument manufacture.

Austen regularly met or heard such professionals, from Venanzio Rauzzini, the Italian-born singer and impresario at Bath; to Philippe-Jacques Meyer, her niece Fanny’s French harp teacher in London; to the German émigrés Wilhelm and Johann Baptist Cramer, who were regular performers at the Hampshire Music Meetings she attended in Winchester.

Pieces by all these composers found their way into the family music books. Her own performance of songs in French and Italian reinforced language learning of the kind Anne Elliot displays in Persuasion, when she translates the words of an Italian aria for Mr Elliot during a concert at Bath.

British amateurs were also voracious consumers of music by Continental composers who never came to England, or who were only occasional visitors. And music offered depictions not only of European peoples and cultures but provided perspectives on major events.

For Jane’s cousin Eliza de Feuillide, the French Revolution was a lived experience; her husband was executed while she sought refuge in England. Jane’s music books include not only fashionable Parisian songs and instrumental music obtained from Eliza, but also pieces specifically associated with revolutionary themes – like the version of the Marseillaise that she copied into her vocal manuscript.

This is reflective of the wider practice of collecting musical and other materials by women at home, showing how they used these things to process cultural events. The renowned collector, Sarah Sophia Banks kept this decorative edition of the Marseillaise along with other printed items relating to the French Revolution.

While we can’t always know what discussions such pieces might have sparked, in at least one instance Jane’s music books suggest how she may have viewed events. Her vocal copybook includes the Anglo-Italian composer Stephen Storace’s ‘Captivity,’ a setting of the Hampshire clergyman Joshua Jeans’s poem in the voice of the imprisoned Marie Antoinette. 

Austen copied it into her book next to Giacomo Gotifredo Ferrari’s 'Queen Mary’s Lamentation’, a song in the voice of Mary, Queen of Scots, on the eve of her execution. The juxtaposition assimilates the contemporary tragedy of Marie Antoinette to Austen’s knowledge of British history, drawing a connection between these two women and their emotions in the face of a cruel destiny determined by political circumstances.

Imperial and colonial threads were woven through Austen’s musical experience, constructing knowledge of lands beyond Western Europe. The transatlantic slave trade and extraction practices in the Caribbean, India, and Africa generated wealth and raw materials that were bound up into all aspects of Georgian musical culture – from the ivory and exotic woods used for instruments, to funding concert life in Britain’s rapidly growing cities. 

Pieces from the Austen family music books dramatize complex entanglements between Britons and racially marked others, borrowing from the musical vocabulary of sentimental song to create depictions of Indian, African, and Caribbean peoples. 

Austen owned a copy of 'Poor Orra Tink of Yanko Dear' from the Southampton composer Charles Dibdin’s hit opera The Islanders, which we can read against Austen’s references to plantation economies in Mansfield Park.

The Islanders sets the tale of the indigenous Caribbean chieftain, Yanko, and his wife Orra, who has been enslaved by White invaders and believes her husband is dead (he is actually alive and will free her in an ending that sees the Spanish governor abolish slavery on the island).

While reviewers called attention to its antislavery and antiracist themes, these were communicated within stage conventions developed in the 1760s: Orra and Yanko were both played by White actors in copperface. And although Yanko speaks standard English, Orra uses pidgin, a mark of lower status here attached to her gender.

At the same time, her fidelity to Yanko makes her a noble figure, a quality predominantly reflected in her songs. ‘Poor Orra’ expresses her grief over Yanko’s presumed death in heart-tugging musical terms that elevate the character into a heroine of sensibility. While the piece uses British musical conventions – not indigenous song traditions – it generated a performance of Caribbean otherness within Austen’s culture, one she could undertake herself as an exercise in musical imagination.

As we ourselves imagine Austen at music in the years around 1800, the social spotlight is not the only picture we can conjure. Music was a rich and multivalent personal resource, helping amateur musicians not only to develop their own sense of self but allowing them to explore the world, to try on alternative identities and to explore complex positions towards difference.

Austen’s own music-making provided room for performative adoption of voice in a way that resonates with her work as a creator of imaginative fiction. It could serve as a tool in thinking through the knotty cultural interconnections, entanglements, and oppressions that marked her time. Her music-making at home was a significant way to produce knowledge about the wider world.

Further reading

Brooks, Jeanice. “In Search of Austen’s Missing Songs.” Review of English Studies 67 (2016): 914-45.

Bray, Joe, and Hannah Moss, eds. The Edinburgh Companion to Austen and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024.

Dooley, Gillian. She Played and Sang: Jane Austen and Music. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024.

Wheeler, Roxann. “The Long Life of Orra’s Songs: The Legacy of Charles Dibdin’s The Islanders and West Indian Stage Pidgin.” The Eighteenth Century 62 (2021): 189-224.

Zionkowsky, Linda, with Miriam F. Hart, eds. Women and Music in the Age of Austen. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2023.

Acknowledgements

Recordings in this article were made in 2019 at Jane Austen’s House, Chawton, Hampshire, with generous support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain, the University of Southampton, Jane Austen’s House and Sydney Living Museums. © University of Southampton, and may be used under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.