Women Writing Music in Late Eighteenth-Century England

Combining new musicology trends, formal musical analysis, and literary feminist recovery work, Leslie Ritchie examines rare poetic, didactic, fictional, and musical texts written by women in late eighteenth-century Britain. Whether crafting works consonant with societal ideals of charitable, natural, and national order, re-imagining their participation in these musical aids to social harmony, or writing about music, women contributed significantly to the formation of British cultural identity and theories of music's role in forming female subjectivities.

Leslie Ritchie is Associate Professor of English at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada.

Contents: Introduction: composing themselves: musical and social harmony; Discipline, pleasure, and practice; Women's occasion for music: the performative continuum and lyrical categories; Caritas; or, women and musically enacted charity; Arcadia: or, women's strategic use of the pastoral; Britannia: or women and songs of nation and otherness; Conclusion; Bibliography. Index.