At the same time, the market for domestic repertories relied heavily on the activities of amateur female performers such as Jane Austen herself. Although women composers enjoyed some success, particularly with songs, harp and keyboard music intended for domestic consumption, male composers overwhelmingly dominated musical production. At the turn of the nineteenth century, music involved even more strongly gendered patterns of creative and affective agency than books. But while Anne’s response refers particularly to books, the conversation as a whole relates to a wider range of expressive culture, including song. In this celebrated passage, Austen opens striking perspectives on her position as a female author and a woman reading books by men. I will not allow books to prove any thing’. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree the pen has been in their hands. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story.
Anne concurs: ‘Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men’.
Harville claims: ‘But let me observe that all histories are against you, all stories, prose and verse Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But Austen’s fiction is not a simple exercise of life into writing: her reflections on constancy in Persuasion are framed in the context of literary tradition and presented as an act of literary criticism. 1 In letters to her young relation, Austen tested Fanny’s feelings and offered opinions on the difficulty of maintaining a long and uncertain engagement. Scholars have read Austen’s involvement in her niece Fanny Knight’s situation in late 1814, when Fanny was agonising over a marriage proposal, as one stimulus for the reworking. In a pivotal new scene, Anne Elliot and Captain Harville debate whether men or women love most faithfully in adversity.
In summer 1816, Jane Austen rewrote the conclusion of her final completed novel, posthumously published as 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. 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 trace the literary sources of the poems and outline the musical networks of transmission through which Austen obtained them. 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. 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. This study identifies three songs that Austen performed at Chawton after 1809, during the years she was drafting her late novels. 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. Whether it’s about getting smashed, rolling your eyes at those New Year’s resolutions, or just plain wishing people a Happy New year, we bet people are gonna relate and engage.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. Pick your favorite memes and post them on social media. Get the new year rolling by posting these witty and funny New Year memes. Hey buddies, start the year right with our New Year meme collection!