Jane Austen and Music

In this essay, Laura Vorachek argues that music’s disciplinary function was especially apparent in music instruction material directed at a female audience. With instructions on practicing, physical decorum, and music selection, keyboard method books ordered women’s conduct in accordance with Regency gender norms. Music performance was also gender performance. However, method books’ attempts to contain women indirectly communicated the possibility that limitations placed on female musicians could be exceeded. Reading late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century keyboard instruction manuals in conjunction with Austen’s novels, this essay illuminates the ways her characters refuse or subvert cultural dictates about gender and music.