Author Profile

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• 1775-1817 (age 42)

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• An English Novelist

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• Born in Steventon, United Kingdom

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• Nearly died of typhus in boarding school.

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• Published under a pseudonym all her life, her brother only revealed her identity upon her death.

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• Though she never married, Austen was engaged at 27: for one night. She accepted the proposal of a friend of a friend that night, and changed her mind, rejecting him the next morning.

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• When journalists reported that Winston Churchill had been reading Pride and Prejudice on his sickbed during World War II, a national craze started of reading/re-reading Austen. Her novel’s emphasis on traditions /the survival of the community is often credited as contributing to the high British morale that got the public through the war victoriously.

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• She invented the double bed. And the spongecake.  Well, she coined the terms…. And that’s basically the same thing, right?

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Content

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So, this shit has been my baby for past three months or so. I heard that we had to write a completely original academic paper for a ten-credit module, and pretty much had a stress breakdown. I cried. A lot. But I eventually got my shit together and decided that would be a pretty cool (easy) project to take a look at the role of music in Pride and Prejudice.

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Music started to draw from literature a lot during the romantic period, like programme music got hella popular and composers started writing operas that the general public could understand. A lot of other students of the class were really interested in this and ended up doing very cool papers on various aspects thereof. But I was more interested in seeing if this was a two way street wherein music gave back to literature. So I picked a classic book that I love from the nineteenth century, Pride and Prejudice, and here’s the dealio:

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Loads of scholars went off talking about how music/dance have this big role in the novel because of all the big fancy balls, etc etc etc. And many many scholars have also studied the connection between aristocratic femininity and music: upper class ladies were supposed to be good enough to entertain their friends and family, but not so good they encroached on the professional world. Das a man’s job, honey.

But nobody had ever really slapped these two concepts together and talked about how music was used as a mode of character development (in a novel dominated by female characters), and so, as an English student, I was like “das my shit.” So I took three prominent female characters from the novel: Elizabeth Bennet, Mary Bennet, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh. In each case, music forms a part of the character’s identity, due the ladies’ unique relationship with this social obligation.

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So Elizabeth Bennet is like this social butterfly. She’s pretty, she’s clever, and she’s average enough in terms of musical skill. She stays in her lane, and everyone loves hearing her play, even though she’s not amazingly talented.

 

But Mary, Elizabeth’s younger sister, is the complete opposite. She’s got this slight obsession with the piano: she practices constantly, and is always playing these big, complicated, unpleasant works inexpertly at public balls. She’s got technical ability, but no musical talent, and yet she works so hard! Tbh, I think she does it to stand out from her sisters; she’s the middle child of five daughters, and she’s the least attractive out of all of them. Das rough.

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And then Lady Catherine de Bourgh acts as a foil to both of the Bennet sisters. Lady Catherine literally can’t play music, she never learned. So she’s kind of hollow, lacking an emotional outlet through which to express herself, when all the other ladies of the day have the piano to do this. So she tries to overcompensate for her lack of practical ability by pretending that she has amazing taste and knowledge about music. She doesn’t. She’s a little bit of a bitch. But whatever.

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So yeah, that was fun.

Peace out, kids xx

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-Emma

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