Augusta Browne: Composer and Woman of Letters in Nineteenth-Century America by Bonny H. Miller

Abstract

Reviewed by: Augusta Browne: Composer and Woman of Letters in Nineteenth-Century America by Bonny H. Miller Elissa Stroman Augusta Browne: Composer and Woman of Letters in Nineteenth-Century America. By Bonny H. Miller. (Eastman Studies in Music.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2020. [xiii, 457 p. ISBN 9781580469722 (hardcover), $135; ISBN 9781787448834 (e-book), price varies.] Music examples, illustrations, tables, bibliography, index, works list. "Augusta Browne's outsider status and self-agency," author Bonny H. Miller explains in the introduction, "offer a potent narrative that transcends antebellum and Victorian-era norms in America. She constructed a substantial legacy in American music and journalism through talent, craft, persistence, outreach, and nineteenth-century equivalents of modern marketing strategies" (p. 1). Indeed, upon reading Miller's biography, one might call Augusta Browne (1820–1882) a nineteenth-century "multihyphenate," to invoke an au courant term. Browne taught, performed, composed, and wrote, melding all of those activities into a career spanning over fifty years. This impressive biography asks us to question what is canonic music (or who is a canonic composer), what makes a woman's work feminist, and the ways in which society and family impact one's career trajectory. Miller's remarkable tome, amassing over two decades of research, is a deep dive into the life history of Browne, piecing together her story from extant primary sources: government records, newly scanned periodicals and newspapers, scant correspondence scattered across many archives, and surviving sheet music. In the first nine chapters, Miller traces Browne's life year by year in meticulous detail, recreating the entire musical society in which Browne worked. Throughout her life, family obligations required frequent moves, including stints in Baltimore, New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Despite the seeming instability, Browne made her concert debut at age six and was a published composer as a teenager. Miller shows how at all times Browne was an entrepreneur, finding work wherever she could and marketing her writing, sheet music, teaching, and performing (as a church organist). Each chapter spans typically between five and ten years of her life and is delineated by major activities or milestones: her family origins, the start of [End Page 404] her father's music academy in Boston, her early compositions in Philadelphia, being a music teacher in New York, her literary debut, marriage, the Civil War and family struggles, and moving to Washington, D.C. This chronological structure allows readers to see how Browne was a woman of her age who grappled with major issues and ideologies of the nineteenth century. One of the overarching themes of the book is the impact Browne's family had on her career trajectory, especially considering the immense losses she faced. Early on, Miller calls Browne's childhood a "traumatic odyssey" (p. 40), but that was before we learned she was the third of nine siblings, seven of whom she outlived. Writing was a cathartic outlet for Browne, producing, for example, a tribute to her brother, Hamilton, the Young Artist (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1852), which Miller situates in nineteenth-century condolence literature. Further, after only three years of marriage (and having married later in life, at age thirty-five), Browne suddenly lost her husband. As a new widow, she published a popular devotional work; Browne's faith was an outlet that sustained her throughout her life's tragedies and offers another common thread in this biography. Miller admits that while Browne's "story emerges as both old fashioned and strikingly modern" (p. 1), she also was definitively a woman of her time. Though we may wish to see her as a boundary-breaking feminist, "that is not the primary narrative of her life that has emerged from the abundance of her recently digitized prose" (p. xii). Miller argues Browne worked from within the expected spaces of her age. Browne had to tread carefully, navigating expectations for female decorum and avoiding implications of impropriety while also being a successful working musician, composer, and writer. "Gender was the elephant in the room" (p. 101), and throughout the book Miller effectively addresses gender issues. Of note is the discussion regarding the opportunities (or lack thereof) available to Browne as an unmarried...