Jane Austen’s Musical Life | Gillian Dooley

In her surviving letters, Jane Austen mentions music occasionally among news of friends, neighbors and family. We know that she played the piano and sang, apparently practicing regularly when she could. The memories of relations who were still young when she died – especially her niece Caroline – give us an idea of the place of music in her daily life. There is also rich evidence in the surviving music books from the collection of Austen and her family circle, much of which is copied in her own handwriting.

Austen sometimes implies her dislike of public concerts and her appreciation of people who are honest about their lack of musical taste. At other times she expresses genuine enjoyment of a superior performance. Some of these attitudes are also displayed in the novels, but there are subtleties and ambiguities in the way she uses music and musicianship in her writing to illuminate her characters and sometimes to advance her plots. In this talk, I will discuss various aspects of music in Austen’s life and work and give some idea of the music that she played and sang.

Gillian Dooley is an Honorary Associate Professor in English at Flinders University, South Australia. She has published and presented internationally on various topics, including Jane Austen, often with an emphasis on music. She was co-convenor of the ‘Immortal Austen’ conference in Adelaide, July 2017, and as a singer she has been curating and presenting programs of music from Austen’s personal collection since 2007. In 2021 she completed a detailed index of each of the 500-600 items in the Austen music collections digitized by University of Southampton, and her book She Played and Sang: Jane Austen and Music was published by Manchester University Press in 2024.