She played and sang: Gillian Dooley’s new book is the fruit of 15 years research on the music collections of Jane Austen and her family

One of Jane Austen’s manuscripts

Gillian Dooley‘s book, She played and sang: Jane Austen and music, was published by Manchester University Press in March 2024. The book looks at the central role that music played in Austen’s life, and how she made brilliant use of it in her books, exploring a recently recovered treasure trove of evidence, including her music books alongside letters and family records, bringing out a previously unregarded aspect of Austen’s world.

Gillian Dooley (Photo: IASH-The University of Edinburgh)

Gillian is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in English at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia and was previously a librarian there. She has been working on the topic of music in Jane Austen’s novels for over 25 years, and for the last 15 has been working on the collection of music owned by Austen and her family. These academic interests ran alongside Gillian’s life as a librarian. She describes the library as a good place to be if you were also doing literature research, but also Gillian helped put on concerts in the library.

There have been a few books dealing with music in Jane Austen’s world, but Gillian comments that Austen’s personal life and her possible love affairs are far more sensational subjects. Also, people don’t think of the music in her music books as particularly significant, but Gillian’s attitude changed as she got to know it. She points out that earlier writings have often been patronising about the music, that it wasn’t Mozart or Beethoven, the idea that Austen’s England was the land without music. 

Whilst literature is Gillian’s home discipline, music is rather more than just a hobby. She has always been interested in Jane Austen and inevitably the music crept in. Music in Austen’s novels has a meaning that she attributes or implies, perhaps different to her own regard for music in the home. Gillian points out that what you do as a writer can involve pulling what you know but using this in rather different ways. The music in Austen’s life must have undoubtedly influenced her, but this is not a simple relationship.

We have some writing about music in Austen’s letters. In one she says that she does not like a person because they say they do not like music, but in another letter, Austen mentions someone else as being a fine musician. As Gillian sees it, Austen is saying she is interested in people being honest, not pretending to like music. Characters such as Mrs Elton in Emma and Lady Middleton in Sense and Sensibility claim to like music but never pay it any attention, whilst characters like Eleanor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility are not interested in music and don’t pretend to be, but characters who love it, get absorbed in it. The importance for Austen seems to have been characters being honest, not being affected.

Our knowledge of Jane Austen’s own tastes comes from the music collections made by herself and her family. About half is printed music and half is written in manuscript. Of the seven or eight volumes (out of 20) that actually belonged to her, four have manuscript in her hand. But Gillian is wary of reading too much into this, citing a book belonging to her sister-in-law, Elizabeth, that has four pieces in Austen’s hand. But Austen may not have copied them because they were her favourites, but simply as a favour to her sister-in-law. Elizabeth was frequently pregnant and whilst Austen was staying with her, copying music may have been for Elizabeth and nothing to do with Austen’s tastes. The pieces that Austen copied for her own use are likely to be music that she was particularly interested in, but then again buying music was expensive, so it was a case of either investing time or money. When visiting other people, copying music out may have been something of a social obligation, too.

We know that she liked the music of Charles Dibdin (1745-1814), particularly his comic songs, perhaps a rather less refined taste than we might expect from Jane Austen. [Dibdin is best known for his song, Tom Bowling, but Retrospect Opera have been exploring his other repertoire including a disc of his songs, and his musical comedy, The Jubilee]. 

Austen did not have much Italian music in her collection, and only three Italian arias including a duet from Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte which has no title or composer. The other two Italian songs are folk songs, but then the link between folk music and theatre music was very porous. The main sort of English opera was ballad opera, which re-used existing tunes and folk tunes. There is more French music than Italian in Austen’s collection but then, this may simply be down to availability, because her cousin Elizabeth married a French count and was living in France. There are songs about the sea and sailors. These were generally popular, there are songs by Dibdin in the style in the collection, but we should also bear in mind that two of her brothers were sailors. About half the music in Austen’s books is for solo piano or piano with an obligato instrument.

The music people played and were interested in was contemporary. Austen had a lot more music by Thomas Arne (1710-1778) than Handel (1685-1759), and she had no music by ‘ancient’ composers in her collection. This is a very different attitude from ours, where we see modern music as elite.

The most direct evidence we have of her tastes is her niece Caroline writing in 1869/70 (when Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Legh wrote A Memoir of Jane Austen) recalling four songs that she heard Jane Austen singing, one French, and two Scottish songs and an English theatre song. Yet of these four, only one is in Austen’s manuscript collection, thus undermining the idea that this records her favourites. But then Caroline is recalling Jane Austen in her 30s, when her tastes may have changed from the teenager who first started assembling the music collections.

Now that the book is published, Gillian comments that there is always more to learn, more to work on; after publication, more information comes out of the woodwork. Recently she was invited to contribute a chapter to a book about Northanger Abbey. Gillian always said that there was no music in the novel, but she looked again and wrote a 6000-word essay. There are always little things that you can burrow into.

One area she ignores in the book is anything outside the Austen family’s music collection. Then there is the subject of music associated with Jane Austen’s work after her death, including the music used in films and television adaptations, which reflects the director’s ideas rather than Austen’s own taste. But Gillian adds that she likes the films and television adaptations not to be too slavish. Film has to be new, someone else’s vision and Gillian is not convinced about a film that has a score that only uses music Austen knew. Looking ahead, Gillian is also hoping to write about another Austen adaptation, Jonathan Dove and Alasdair Middleton’s opera Mansfield Park.

Matthew Flinders – by Antoine Toussaint de Chazal painted in Mauritius in 1806–07

When Gillian and I chatted in London she was on an extended tour, visiting the UK, Ireland Italy and the USA. She had just been to the reinterment of Matthew Flinders (1774-1814), the British navigator and cartographer who led the first inshore circumnavigation of mainland Australia. He is also credited as being the first person to utilise the name Australia to describe the entirety of that continent. In 2019, his grave in London was rediscovered by archaeologists and on 13 July 2024, Flinders remains were reburied at the Church of St Mary and the Holy Rood in Donington, Flinders’ birthplace. Gillian was there.

She has written about Matthew Flinders in her book Matthew Flinders: The Man behind the Map (2022). There are strange links between Flinders and Austen. There is a song in Jane Austen’s collection called William which is taken from a Haydn piano sonata, whilst Matthew Flinders also adapted another Haydn sonata for a song. Flinders and Austen are almost exact contemporaries, and he knew one of her brothers in the Navy.

• Gillian Dooley – She played and sang: Jane Austen and Music (2024) – Manchester University Press
• Gillian Dooley – Matthew Flinders: The man behind the map (2022) – Wakefield Press