News & Diary - 19.12.2025
Jane Austen and Music: A blog by Anna Matthews
Music played a significant role in Jane Austen’s life. Austen wrote; ‘without music, life would be a blank to me’. Young women of her social class were expected to be musically accomplished. Austen was a skilled pianist, taking lessons from an early age and practising daily well into adult life. By 1796, the Austen family had acquired a piano and Jane was taking lessons from George Chard, the Winchester Cathedral organist and composer. Jane’s piano and most of her copy books were sold when the family moved to Bath in 1801. During her time in Bath (1801-1806), she attended concerts in the Octagon Room of the Assembly Rooms. Once a piano came back into her possession in Chawton, where she lived from 1809-1817, she resumed practising every day before breakfast. She played from manuscripts she copied herself – copies so neat, her niece said they were ‘as easy to read as print’. The 18 albums which comprise the Austen Family Music Books have been preserved to this day and contain around 600 pieces that belonged to Jane and her relations.
Music was central to social and domestic life in the Regency era. Jane Austen’s novels include characters who love music, but little mention is made of composers. The only composer mentioned is the publisher and pianist John Baptiste Cramer, who published arrangements of Robin Adair, enigmatically sung by Jane Fairfax in Emma, as she accompanies herself on her new piano, a covert gift from her secret lover Frank Churchill.
Jane Austen’s love of music was frequently embodied in the strong female characters of her novels, portrayed as domestic singers, pianists, or both – Georgiana Darcy, Mary Bennet & Elizabeth Bennet (Pride and Prejudice); Anne Elliot (Persuasion); Jane Fairfax (Emma); and Marianne Dashwood (Sense and Sensibility). In contrast, Catherine Morland, the flighty young heroine of Northanger Abbey, could not ‘have been more delighted when the music master was dismissed’ – tinkling on the spinet was amusing for her but she did not take to a serious study of music. Perhaps, when Austen was constructing Catherine’s character, she had in her mind the title she ascribed in her own hand to a music book in the Austen’s collection: ‘Juvenile Songs and Lessons – for young beginners who don’t know enough to practise’.
The musical scenes in Austen’s novels are rarely incidental – they are carefully constructed to advance storylines of courtship and social hierarchy. Music is a used as a medium via which characters perform socially, both in the literal sense of recitals at gatherings and in the figurative sense of signalling admirable qualities to eligible bachelors; as Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice expounds, ‘A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages to deserve the word accomplished’. Perceptive readers will identify how Austen uses music as a tool to accelerate the plots of her novels, for example the scandalously romantic subtext associated with the pianoforte anonymously gifted to Jane Fairfax by her secret fiancé Frank Churchill in Emma.
