On Thursday 21 March at Flinders University Anna Goldsworthy launched Gillian Dooley’s latest book, She Played and Sang: Jane Austen and music, before assorted academics, alumni and Austen-ites (who provided the excellent catering).
The volume has all the visual attractions of slighter books marketed with women in mind, in this case a blue jacket both floral and musical, with ribbon-like staves decorating front and rear, and a songbird on the spine. It is in fact an academic treatise, yet unusually well written and lucid for such. It is founded on years of scholarship, cataloguing the Austen family music books comprising 18 sheet music albums and loose sheets – altogether over 500 individual items. About 160 of these are in Jane’s own hand (the tedious job of transcribing music for family entertainment naturally fell to the women).
Bookmarking Appendix One, ‘The Austen family network’, is invaluable in keeping track of the Austen family members recurring throughout the text. The book is accessible to any reader of Austen whose enthusiasm for her work is stimulated by an increased understanding of the world she inhabited, in this case the importance of music, both vocal and instrumental, in her world and her daily life. This importance finds expression in the range of references to music in the novels and the charged links Austen establishes between her characters and music.
Not just for Jane-ites, and Austen-ites, She Played and Sang is for anyone interested in the history of music.
Reviewed by Judith Crabb
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gillian Dooley is an Honorary Associate Professor in English Literature, having retired from Flinders University Library, where she had been Special Collections Librarian 1999-2015 and Publishing Support Librarian 2016-2017, in May 2017.
She graduated from Flinders with a PhD in English in 2001. She was the founding general editor of the Flinders Humanities Research Centre’s electronic journal Transnational Literature from 2008-2018, and was founding co-editor of Writers in Conversation 2014-2020. She has published several monographs and scholarly editions and more than 100 journal articles and book chapters.
Her research interests include the writers J M Coetzee, Iris Murdoch, V.S. Naipaul, Jane Austen, and maritime explorer Matthew Flinders. She has presented a number of keynotes and public lectures, in person and online, all over the world. Her particular interest is in music and literature, and as a singer she often organises and performs in programs of music with literary themes. In 2023 she was a visiting fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University.
0 Comments