Jane Austen, Home and Away | Jeanice Brooks

Though visions of Austen as a strictly “domestic” novelist have long been discarded, most accounts of her relationship with music continue to emphasize narratives of containment, highlighting themes of gentility and female accomplishment. This talk in contrast explores how music making shaped perceptions of people and lands far beyond the British home. The heterogenous and highly international vocal and instrumental music in Austen’s repertoire explored relationships with Scotland, events on the Continent including the French Revolution, and Britain’s colonial expansion, among many other topics. In constructing the musical scenes in her fiction, Austen (and her early readers) drew upon music as a way of apprehending and exploring the world.

Jeanice Brooks is Professor of Music at the University of Southampton (UK). She has research interests in early modern and twentieth-century French music, domestic music in eighteenth-century Britain, music and gender, and museum sound. She is the author of Courtly Song…