In Search of Austen’s ‘Missing Songs’

Jeanice Brooks

doi:10.1093/res/hgw035

Abstract

Jane Austen was a trained musician who regularly played and sang during much of her adult life, yet song has not figured prominently in understandings of her relation to literary tradition. Music was not only a polite entertainment, however, but provided Austen with a significant source of textual transmission and unique opportunities for critical engagement through performance. This study identifies three songs that Austen performed at Chawton after 1809, during the years she was drafting her late novels. They appear in music albums owned by the Austen family in the early 19th century, currently held in private collections that have until recently been unavailable to scholars. The songs set texts by Robert Burns, ‘Monk’ Lewis, and Claris de Florian, and all three treat the topic of fidelity within different generic and stylistic frameworks. I trace the literary sources of the poems and outline the musical networks of transmission through which Austen obtained them. I then examine the musical settings, investigating the affective aspects of performance and exploring how attention to this aspect of song illuminates Austen’s treatment of Burns in the Sanditon draft and her handling of themes of romance in Persuasion. I argue that resituating song within Austen’s intellectual and emotional landscape can not only generate new understandings of her relation to literary antecedents but also contribute new perspectives to long-debated questions of Austen’s relation to feeling.

Highlights

Jane Austen was a trained musician who regularly played and sang during much of her adult life, yet song has not figured prominently in understandings of her relation to literary tradition
This study identifies three songs that Austen performed at Chawton after 1809, during the years she was drafting her late novels. They appear in music albums owned by the Austen family in the early nineteenth century, currently held in private collections that have until recently been unavailable to scholars
I am grateful to Richard Jenkyns and Richard Knight for access to their collections, and to the National Trust and Cheshire East Council for access to manuscripts at Tatton Park

Summary

Jane Austen’s ‘missing songs’

Austen’s writing often refers to music making, most of what we know about her own performance comes from much later family memoirs. Part of the Knight family library at Chawton House, these albums became more widely known in the mid-1930s, and since their donation to the Jane Austen Memorial Trust in 1952 they have been regularly drawn upon by both musicologists and Austen scholars.[10] One of the books contains a version of ‘The yellow-haired laddie’ that helps to substantiate Fowles’s recollection of Austen’s performances. These albums became more widely known in the mid-1930s, and since their donation to the Jane Austen Memorial Trust in 1952 they have been regularly drawn upon by both musicologists and Austen scholars.[10] One of the books contains a version of ‘The yellow-haired laddie’ that helps to substantiate Fowles’s recollection of Austen’s performances They shed no further light on the music Caroline remembered. These largely unstudied books prove to be just as interesting as the better-known albums owned by the museum, and they contain all three songs that Caroline Austen remembered

Performing criticism—the ‘Song from Burns’

Performing romance: ‘Que j’aime avoir les hirondelles’

Conclusion