In her letters Jane Austen sometimes described visits to the theatre, often in a critical or dismissive way.  After one night at the theatre in November 1814, at which she saw Eliza O’Neill and Charles Mayne Young in David Garrick’s Isabella, or the Fatal Marriage, she wrote to her niece Anna, “I fancy I want something more than can be.  Acting seldom satisfies me” (29 November 1814).  She levelled this sort of criticism not only at actors but also at singers on stage.  Her assessment of the soprano Catherine Stephens in Thomas Arne’s English opera Artaxerxes was “a pleasing person & no skill in acting” (9 March 1814).

Many English plays of the period included some songs alongside spoken dialogue, a common practice dating back at least to Shakespeare’s plays, many of which feature songs.  London’s three main theatres were licensed for different types of performance.  The Opera House, or King’s Theatre, was the only venue where Italian opera was performed; the two patent theatres at Drury Lane and Covent Garden (and, in the summer, at Haymarket) were restricted to English language works.  Some actors, such as Dorothea Jordan, were well known as both opera singers and actors and would appear in both Italian opera and English theatre.  There is no record of Austen attending the Opera House, but we know she saw several plays. 

From a remark Austen made to her brother Frank in 1813, one might deduce that she didn’t approve of the fashion to include songs in dramatic works:  she dismissed most of the plays she had seen recently as “Sing-song & trumpery” (25 September 1813).  Nevertheless, many of the songs in Austen’s collection originated on the English stage.  It may be that she liked the songs well enough in themselves but felt they added little to the drama in the theatrical context.  Other pieces in her collection, both vocal and instrumental, are drawn from French operas or other theatrical works.  The sheet music of these songs was often published individually, and there are many examples of these printed publications in the Austen family music collections as well as manuscripts copied from the printed music.  Around one hundred songs are transcribed in Jane Austen’s own handwriting, and about one-third of these come from stage performances of various kinds. 

Of the instrumental pieces, it is important to note that many of her instrumental hand-copied manuscripts and printed scores are transcriptions for harpsichord or pianoforte.  These keyboard reductions—musical scores originally written for voice, instruments, or an assortment of both and rescored to be played on the piano—cover a wide variety of genres, including symphonic and oratorio movements, dances, and music from the theatre and the opera (such as the overtures to Arne’s Artaxerxes and Dalayrac’s Renaud d'Ast discussed below).  This was common practice at the time, particularly as the pianoforte had become a central feature in homes of the gentry and middle class by the end of the eighteenth century.  Long after the orchestral prototypes were premiered on the London stage, keyboard transcriptions were being performed in drawing rooms and at musical gatherings in the country.  Because Austen played as well as sang,1 she participated in this tradition of playing transcriptions and was well-versed in it from her own personal collection and from scores she borrowed from family members and neighbors. 

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, keyboard transcriptions were copied directly from the original composition with no alteration or arrangement; as such, Austen’s instrumental theatre pieces are note for note what is printed in the original orchestral scores, including performance notations.  It wasn’t until the second decade of the nineteenth century, which was later than Austen collected the pieces in her collection, that keyboardists and composers began to produce embellished arrangements of original scores.  Therefore, despite being reduced to one instrument, Austen’s transcriptions reflect the orchestration and nature of the music she experienced at the theatre. 

It’s not clear which instrumental pieces from her collection Austen particularly favored, but we do have a record of some of the songs Austen sang to herself and to her relatives.  More than fifty years after her death, her niece Caroline recalled three songs her aunt had sung in her last years:  an English theatre song, “Oh No, My Love, No” or “The Wife’s Farewell”; a French romance, “Que j’aime à voir les hirondelles”; and a Scottish folk song, “Their Groves o’ Sweet Myrtle,” with words by Robert Burns.  In addition, she quotes a letter from a cousin who recalled another Scottish folk song that Austen sang, “The Yellow-Haired Laddie” (193–94).  These songs are all quite different in mood and dramatic effect, ranging from the sardonic irony of the theatre song to the heartfelt romanticism of the French song (Dooley, She Played 229–34). 

All musical performance includes an element of the dramatic, and although Austen certainly played purely instrumental music, the combination of words with music multiplies the possibilities for expression of emotions and attitudes.  Austen knew the sensation of embodying various subject positions in song.  It seems likely that this embodied knowledge was an important element in her writing practice from her juvenilia onwards.  The experience of singing these mini-narratives, sometimes with a young relative listening, was part of her artistic practice that cannot be discounted when studying the rhetoric of her prose.2 

It is difficult to be specific about this kind of influence, especially in Austen’s mature work.  There are some suggestive links between songs she knew as a teenager and song lyrics and even some incidents included in the juvenilia,3 but as her writing skill developed and she grew more confident, the influences became more subtle, and she used intertextual material in a more organic way.  As with her reading material, which Susan Allen Ford finds is used “in more complex ways” in her adult novels (231), the musical influence becomes more integrated into her fictional craft.  Music appears in various contexts in much of the fiction, but only one song (“Robin Adair”) and one composer (Johann Baptist Cramer) are mentioned in any of the novels (Dooley, She Played 222–23).  And although writing prose is in many ways different from performing music, there are rhetorical aspects they share, such as rhythm, balance, phrasing, and even dynamics. 

This program of music, therefore, is designed to give a sample of the theatrical music that Austen knew, both as a performer and a listener, but it does not posit explicit links with any of Austen’s writings.  It begins with music by Thomas Arne, a composer Austen would have encountered during her earliest musical education and who remained a presence in her musical life.  In the second bracket, we present some examples of theatrical music adapted from European sources for the London stage, while the third bracket features music from various French theatrical productions.  The fourth section includes two songs by the English maverick composer and performer Charles Dibdin, whose sense of humor seems to have appealed to Austen.  We end the program with music by three young men who were friends in Vienna in the 1780s, one of whom is still a household name while the other two, despite their later successes on the London stage, are barely remembered. 

Thomas Augustine Arne 

Thomas Arne (1710–1778) was one of England’s most prominent composers of theatre music.  As a Catholic, he was not able to participate in the music of the established church, the other major arena for musical endeavor in eighteenth-century England.  In church music, George Frederick Handel, who lived in England from 1712 until his death in 1759, reigned supreme, largely thanks to Royal patronage from his Hanoverian compatriots.  Arne, a generation younger than Handel, grew to be his rival in the theatre, and some of his theatrical works were still being performed well into Jane Austen’s lifetime and beyond.  Two of Arne’s most enduring pieces were Comus, adapted from John Milton’s 1634 masque, and his opera Artaxerxes. 

Both works are represented in Jane Austen’s music collection.  Of the composers whose music she collected, Arne was one of the few who came from an earlier generation.  (Most of Austen’s music was composed by her contemporaries.)  New editions of Arne’s work, however, continued to be published long after his death.  An arrangement for voice and piano of the music from Comus, Arne’s Opus 1 from 1738, was published in 1797 in the Piano-forte Magazine, and it is likely that Austen copied her manuscripts of three songs from that source.  The three songs are all quite different:  the first, “How Gentle Was My Damon’s Air,” is a Baroque-style recitative and aria, the lament of a nymph who has lost her lover.  The second is a song about the pleasures of drinking and partying, a short and jocund piece originally for tenor (not included in our program).  The third, “Sweet Echo, Sweetest Nymph,” a soprano aria with flute obbligato, comes soon after the tenor song and provides a ravishing contrast to its earthy gaiety.  Its effect on the other characters is magical.

“How Gentle Was My Damon’s Air,” by Thomas Augustine Arne. 
Performed by Gillian Dooley and Laura Klein in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 17, 2024.
(Click here to listen.)

“Sweet Echo, Sweetest Nymph,” by Thomas Augustine Arne. 
Performed by Musick for Severall Friends, with Garth Rowe on recorder, in Adelaide, South Australia, on October 15, 2022.
(Click here to listen.)

The overture to Artaxerxes is the only piece from Arne’s celebrated 1762 opera that appears in Austen’s manuscript books.  This transcription of the overture for piano solo was copied after 1805, when the previous items in the manuscript book were published; based on the publication year of the likeliest source for her copy, however, it was probably some years before 1814, when she attended the opera in London.  Another piece adapted from the opera is Domenico Corri’s piano arrangement of the celebrated coloratura soprano aria “The Soldier Tir’d”; it is included in a printed album of Corri’s works for solo piano that belonged to Austen and has only recently been rediscovered.4

Overture to Artaxerxes by Thomas Augustine Arne. 
Performed by Laura Klein on a Graf replica pianoforte, University of Colorado Boulder, September 2024.
(Click here to listen.)

“The Soldier Tir’d,” by Thomas Augustine Arne. 
Performed by Laura Klein in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 17, 2024.
(Click here to listen.)

Borrowings and adaptations 

Much new music was written for the English theatre, but it was also common for incidental music and songs to be adapted from other stage works, usually from France or Italy.  The “Music from the Oratory while the Ghost Appears” from Matthew Lewis’s gothic play The Castle Spectre was arranged from a chaconne by Italian opera composer Niccolo Jommelli, which dates from about 1764 and was in fact not originally theatre music.  In Austen’s manuscript book there are four pieces from The Castle Spectre, the other three being vocal ensemble works by Michael Kelly.  Why Austen copied out these four items from Lewis’s play is uncertain, but she is likely to have seen the play in Bath (Gay 52–53), and perhaps took the opportunity to transcribe the music for use in a family production of the play.

“Music from the Oratory while the Ghost Appears,” from The Castle Spectre, arranged from a chaconne by Niccolo Jommelli. 
Performed by Laura Klein in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 17, 2024.
(Click here to listen.)

In Mansfield Park the play Lovers’ Vows, adapted from a work by the German playwright August von Kotzebue, is the young people’s choice for their amateur theatricals.  The song “Silent Sorrow” appears in The Stranger, an adaptation of a different Kotzebue play, Menschenhass und Reue (Misanthropy and Repentance), a dark and melodramatic work in five acts dealing with infidelity and estrangement.  Penny Gay notes that this play was also presented in Bath while Austen lived there (10).  Although the play was translated from the German by Benjamin Thompson, the words of the song were written by Richard Brinsley Sheridan.  When it is sung by hired musicians near the beginning of the fourth act, the Stranger of the title is “surprised and moved,” saying, “Oh! I have heard that air before, but ’twas with other words.”  This statement is not explained, but the song comes at a significant moment in the action of the play, preparing the Stranger for the subsequent encounter with his estranged wife, who, it turns out, taught the song to the musicians.

“Silent Sorrow,” from The Stranger, words by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. 
Performed by Gillian Dooley and Laura Klein in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 17, 2024.
(Click here to listen.)

In Austen’s manuscript the piece is titled “Song from the Stranger—the words by R. B. Sheridan Esq^r.  The air by the Duchess of Devonshire.”5  This song also appears in a manuscript book belonging to Edward Austen’s wife, Elizabeth, not included in the 2015 digitization project of the Austen Family Music Collections and now held at the Blackie House Library and Museum in Edinburgh.  There are several other pieces in that book that appear elsewhere in the Austen music books, either by coincidence or because they were shared (Dooley, She Played 66). 

Fanny Austen (later Knight), Edward and Elizabeth’s eldest daughter, recorded in her diary in July 1805 that “Aunts C. & Jane, Anna, Edwd George Henry William & myself acted ‘The Spoilt child’ & ‘Innocence Rewarded’” (Le Faye 30 July 1805).  Innocence Rewarded has not been identified, but there is more than one play titled The Spoil’d Child.  One is the translation of a French play by Madame de Genlis; the other is a two-act farce by Isaac Bickerstaff, first performed in 1787 and revived in 1804.6  An edition of Bickerstaff’s play was published in London in 1805.  Could that performance and edition have been the impetus for the Godmersham production?  Austen copied one of the songs from the play, perhaps for use in this performance.  Her manuscript is easily legible but looks as if it were written in a hurry, with the note stems angled to the right and no title or dynamic markings. 

The Spoil’d Child is a short play of outstanding silliness—so much so, in fact, that it is reminiscent of some of Austen’s juvenilia.  As a farce, it would not have been the main feature of the evening when it was presented at the theatre, but usually the second item on the program.  When in 1814 Austen reported on her evening at the theatre, she mentioned her pleasure in the farce:  “I was very tired of Artaxerxes, highly amused with the Farce, & in an inferior way with the Pantomime that followed” (5–8 March 1814).  Artaxerxes would have been at least twice the length of the farce (that evening The Devil to Pay by Charles Coffey and John Mottley), and, despite the beauty of Arne’s music, the convoluted plot and high moral seriousness of Artaxerxes might well be less amusing than a farce. 

The spoiled child of the title, Little Pickle, is almost pathologically mischievous, with an indulgent widowed father whose sister does not appreciate her nephew’s practical jokes.  At the end of the first act, the aunt insists that the father send Little Pickle away, as he has just contrived to have her pet parrot baked and served to her for dinner.  At this point in the play, he sings “Since Then I’m Doomed,” a song that, out of context, could be a pathetic appeal to a sympathetic audience but in fact is outrageous in its barefaced insolence.  It is one of three songs in the play, all sung by Little Pickle, who was played originally by the celebrated Dorothea Jordan and in the 1804 revival by Maria Theresa de Camp.

“Since Then I’m Doomed,” by Antoine Laurent Baudron. 
Performed by Gillian Dooley and Laura Klein in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 17, 2024.
(Click here to listen.)

The melody used for this song, by the French composer Antoine Laurent Baudron, is taken from the original, 1775 Paris stage production of Beaumarchais’s play The Barber of Seville—the play on which various operas were later based, including Rossini’s famous work.  The melody was already well-known:  Mozart wrote variations on the theme in 1778 (“12 Variations on Je Suis Lindor” [K.354]).  It was adapted quite freely for the English play, but the outline is still recognizable.  The original French version of the song, “Vous l’ordonnez” or “Je suis Lindor,” appears in one of Elizabeth Austen’s manuscript books. 

Music from the French theatre 

As well as songs such as Baudron’s that were adapted to English for various purposes, Austen’s collection includes several pieces of French theatre music published in France and most likely copied from scores owned by her cousin Eliza de Feuillide.  At the beginning of her album of instrumental music titled “Juvenile Songs and Lessons for Young Beginners who don’t know enough to practise” are arrangements for harp or piano of two French opera overtures published in the French magazine Feuilles de Terpsichore, a periodical offering the latest music arranged for the domestic market.  Nicolas-Marie Dalayrac’s overture to his 1787 comic opera Renaud d’Ast is one of these.  Eliza, fourteen years Austen’s senior, appears to have been a musical mentor to Austen, and music was something they shared throughout their adult lives.

Overture to Renaud d’Ast, by Nicolas-Marie Dalayrac. 
Performed by Laura Klein in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 17, 2024.
(Click here to listen.)

An earlier French opera, from 1784, provides another of the songs in Austen’s manuscript book titled “Songs and Duetts.” There are several French songs in this book, but “La danse n’est pas ce que j’aime” is the only one of them originally written for a French stage work, André Grétry’s Richard Coeur de Lion.  Unlike “Since Then I’m Doomed” and “Silent Sorrow,” this song appears quite incidental to the opera’s main plot, which concerns attempts to free King Richard from his captivity.  Sung by a very young man, who confides to his friend that “it is not the dance I love but Nicolas’s daughter,” the song recounts how they make love behind her mother’s back.  The final refrain runs, “Oh, how I pity you! You won’t see her” (my translations).

“La danse n’est pas ce que j’aime,” by André Grétry. 
Performed by Gillian Dooley and Laura Klein in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 17, 2024.
(Click here to listen.)

“Vous l’ordonnez,” with the same melody as “Since Then I’m Doomed,” is sung at the point in The Barber of Seville when the heroine, Rosina, asks the young man who has been professing his love to identify himself.  While he is, in fact, the Count Almaviva, in this song he claims to be a poor student of humble origins, a ruse to test that Rosina’s love for him is disinterested.  The difference in situation from the song in The Spoil’d Child makes this version lighter and less melodramatic.  The English song, by contrast, has extra bars inserted in the B section of the melody, adding to its drama and pathos.  This song from the French stage is not among Austen’s own surviving manuscripts.

“Vous l’ordonnez,” from The Barber of Seville. 
Performed by Gillian Dooley and Laura Klein in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 17, 2024.
(Click here to listen.)

One of the most passionate and dramatic love songs in Austen’s collection is an aria from an Italian opera, which was adapted for the French stage and published in France in 1789.  In Austen’s manuscript book the title is “Air de Marquis de Tulipano”; the original Italian opera, composed some twenty years earlier, was variously named “Il Marchese di Tulipano” or “Il Matrimonio Inaspetatto.”  The Marquis of Tulipano, as the name implies, is a buffoon—a nouveau riche gentleman who wishes to marry his son, Giorgino, to a “genuine” aristocrat—while Giorgino, despising his father’s pretentions, is in love with a young woman from the local village.  In Italian, the aria begins “Credea, Nina cara”; the French translation begins “Je croyais, ma belle.”

“Je croyais, ma belle,” by Giovanni Paisiello. 
Performed by Gillian Dooley and Laura Klein in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 17, 2024.
(Click here to listen.)

The depth of emotion in this song is increased by its minor tonality, very unusual for music of the time:  it is one of very few songs among Austen’s collection in a minor key.  Its compound triple time gives it a driving, forward rhythm, and the accompaniment emphasizes the urgency of the aria, with restless semiquavers weaving around the melody.  It seems incongruous that such a powerfully moving piece of music appears in a comic opera about a ridiculous figure of fun, but Paisiello, like all good composers—and indeed novelists—was able to dramatize the potentially tragic situation in which ridiculous social pretentions can place characters.  The impact of the aria is confirmed by a review of a Salzburg 2008 production of the opera:  “the cavatina ‘Credea Nina cara’ was outstanding not only in the depth of [Markus] Werba’s lovelorn promise, but how well paired he was to [Riccardo] Muti’s delicate and lovely conducting.  The melodies ducked in and out, creating a heartbreaking interlude between the chaos of the comedy” (“New Music”). 

Paisiello’s opera underwent many versions and revisions.  Several scores and libretti are available online, each of them different in the order of events and musical items; some in two acts, some in three.  The score that includes the French version of the aria in Austen’s manuscript has spoken dialogue with songs, while Paisiello’s original score from 1766 is through-composed, with recitative in Italian and no spoken dialogue.  There is an Italian libretto (apparently including an English translation) published in London in 1786, which announces on the title page that it was “Performed at The King’s Theatre in The Hay-Market.”  It is not known whether the ten-year-old Austen attended this performance, though it is unlikely.  She probably copied the French version of the aria from her cousin Eliza’s printed music collection:  several pieces of French music came to her that way, as we have seen in the case of the overture discussed above. 

Charles Dibdin and The Wags 

Charles Dibdin was a phenomenon in the theatrical world of Georgian England—a songwriter and performer who seemed to have difficulty working with others and so made a career for himself as a solo performer.  He created “Entertainments” in various locations around London and other English cities, where he would sing a program of his own compositions lasting up to three hours.  His songs are often humorous, couched in southern English working-class dialect, and, especially later in his career, he made a specialty of writing songs about the lives and loves of sailors. 

In his 1790 entertainment The Wags, he included two songs that provide contrasting points of view, both of which are in Austen’s early manuscript book “Songs and Duetts.”  “The Soldier’s Adieu” is a rather florid and pompous farewell from a soldier to his wife.  He reproaches her for weeping as he leaves, warning her to “remember thou art a soldier’s wife, these tears but ill become thee.”  He believes, however, that her wishes and prayers for his safety will act as his “sword and buckler,” keeping him safe from harm in battle.  In Austen’s manuscript, she has copied Dibdin’s words but then crossed out the word “soldier’s” and replaced it with “sailor’s” in the line quoted above, presumably as a compliment to her sailor brothers, Frank and Charles.

“The Soldier’s Adieu,” by Charles Dibdin. 
Performed by Gillian Dooley and Laura Klein in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 17, 2024.
(Click here to listen.)

A more self-consciously witty song is “The Joys of the Country,” in which the male singer relates with heavy irony the “joys” he experiences in the countryside, encountering the thorns in the maybushes, being caught in the rain (which gives him the opportunity to view his female relatives in wet diaphanous attire), getting drunk in the local hotel, and staggering home to bed afterwards.

“The Joys of the Country,” by Charles Dibdin. 
Performed by Gillian Dooley and Laura Klein in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 17, 2024.
(Click here to listen.)

Both these songs, like most of Dibdin’s lyrics, use a male persona, but that does not seem to have stopped Austen’s enjoyment.  It seems unlikely that she would have taken the trouble to copy them into her songbook if she were not planning to sing them. 

Mozart, Kelly, and Storace 

In the 1780s, the young Stephen Storace, an English musician of Italian parentage, and Michael Kelly, an Irish musician, were in Vienna.  They knew Wolfgang Mozart.  Storace’s sister Anna (or Nancy) Storace, a well-known soprano, sang the role of Susanna in the first production of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro (1786).  Kelly and the Storaces returned to London in 1787 and were very active composing and performing for the London stage. 

Among the scraps of unacknowledged music by Mozart in Austen’s manuscript collection, an arrangement of an aria from Figaro is perhaps the most intriguing.  It is titled “The Duke of York’s New March: performed by the Coldstream Regiment” and is another example of the mobility of musical material across the Channel.  It’s fascinating, and musically revealing in a multitude of ways, that a melody from an Italian opera by an Austrian composer should be adopted by an English military unit as its own.

“Duke of York’s New March: performed by the Coldstream Regiment,” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. 
Performed by Laura Klein in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 17, 2024.
(Click here to listen.)

Several pieces by Michael Kelly are included in Austen’s manuscript book, including, as noted above, four items from his score for The Castle Spectre.  “Oh No, My Love, No” is not among her manuscripts that have been digitized and catalogued to date.  Her niece Caroline, however, recorded in her memoir, more than fifty years after Austen’s death, that this was a song her aunt had sung in her last years, when she “had nearly left off singing” (193).

“Oh No, My Love, No,” by Michael Kelly, words by Matthew Lewis. 
Performed by Gillian Dooley and Laura Klein in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 17, 2024.
(Click here to listen.)

The song “Oh No, My Love, No,” later published as “The Wife’s Farewell,” first appeared in a play titled Of Age Tomorrow, an adaptation by Thomas Dibdin (Charles Dibdin’s son) of a play by August von Kotzebue, although the song’s words are by Matthew Lewis.  Sung by a minor character, who relates a conversation with a past lover, it has little relevance to the plot.  The song had a life of its own outside the theatre:  “Oh No, My Love, No” was apparently so popular in the play that Kelly and Lewis decided to publish it separately, rebranding it as “The Wife’s Farewell” and matching it with “The Husband’s Return.”  The musical setting emphasizes the ironic twists of the woman’s rhetoric as she reproaches her departing partner while insisting that, oh no, she does not suspect him, she does not believe him unkind, she expects him to remain faithful while he is “straying.”  It is a deceptively simple piece of writing and in performance is full of drama and sarcasm. 

Storace’s comic opera The Siege of Belgrade was presented in Drury Lane in 1791.  There are four songs from this opera among Austen’s manuscripts, along with several other pieces by Storace.  “The Sapling Oak” is sung by a Serbian peasant who likens the liberation of his country from Turkish rule to a sapling formerly choked by noxious weeds.  When the weeds are cleared, the oak tree can begin to flourish and grow into a mighty “forest’s monarch.”  In the opera the song is sung by a baritone, and the vocal range is wide, covering two octaves.  The bottom notes are unusually low among Austen’s music—most of her songs are set reasonably high in the soprano or mezzo-soprano range.  But Storace skilfully uses the variety and range of the music to dramatize the extended metaphor of the oak’s at first failing to thrive and then, liberated, springing to vigorous life.

“The Sapling Oak,” by Stephen Storace. 
Performed by Gillian Dooley and Laura Klein in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 17, 2024.
(Click here to listen.)

Penny Gay writes, “It is reasonable to conclude . . . that Austen took pleasure in acting, in the dramatic embodiment of such characters as she herself created in her fiction and which she delighted to recognize in the fiction of her sister novelists” (11).  It is also reasonable to believe that she enjoyed the same kind of pleasure in singing the narratives and character pieces from the stage that she included in her music books, which her young relatives remembered her singing even towards the end of her life.  The subjects she embodied in these songs were many and varied—male and female, noble and comic, aristocratic and working-class, pompous and passionate.  Apart from the four songs that Caroline recorded, we have no direct evidence of her performances, which were all, apparently, within the domestic sphere and as likely to have been for her own pleasure as to entertain anyone else.  But her extensive collection of music, printed and manuscript, provides evidence that she valued the playing and singing of this music.  And, like the experience of acting that Gay mentions, this “dramatic embodiment” would feed into her own creative practice when writing her characters, moving beyond external observation to putting their inner thoughts and feelings onto the page.

NOTES

1As her niece Caroline recalled, Austen was a diligent pianist and, in her later years, practiced the pianoforte every morning before breakfast (170–71).  Many of the pieces in Austen’s own volumes would have been collected during the years she took lessons with Dr. George Chard, organist of Winchester Cathedral.  For more on the role of lessons and the pianoforte on Austen’s juvenile and adult years, see Klein, “Pride and Prejudice and the Piano: Pianofortes and Music in Jane Austen’s Life and Works.” 

2For further discussion of these influences, see Dooley, “Jane Austen: The Musician as Author.” 

3See Dooley, “Juvenile Songs and Lessons: Music Culture in Jane Austen’s Teenage Years.” 

4In this recently rediscovered volume, there are markers on several of the pages correlating with identical markings in the table of contents; these marks likely indicate pieces Austen played.  “The Soldier Tir’d” is one of the pieces bearing a mark.  Of further interest is the fact that an identical volume belonged to George Chard (her teacher between the years of c. 1790 and 1801).  It is quite plausible, then, that she used this volume in her practice while she was Chard’s student. 

5https://archive.org/details/austen1676459-2001/page/n54/mode/1up?view=theater 

6For two views on the question of which play was performed at Godmersham, see Gillian Dow (119–25) and Dooley (She Played 57–58).