Women's Parlour Song Compilations in the Early Nineteenth Century

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Early 19th-century British music publishers produced a vast amount of sheet music aimed principally at amateur female performers. Music was the most important of the 'accomplishments', the suite of feminine skills cultivated as signs of gentility and taste. The prominence of music in the fabric of women's lives has drawn much scholarly attention, but as yet we know relatively little about historical women's use of music (as opposed to its literary or artistic representation), particularly about the acts of selection and individuation that informed their interaction with music producers. This project aims to address these questions through a study of c. 100 volumes of printed sheet music compiled into personalised albums between 1790 and 1860 for specific amateur female performers, including Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell as well as less famous contemporaries.