The Austen Family Music Books

The Austen family music collection is a mixture of printed and manuscript music that belonged to several members of the extended Austen family. There are more than 500 separate playable pieces of music in the eighteen albums that are available on the Internet Archive. Seven of these albums appear to have belonged to Jane Austen, four of them containing a large volume of manuscript music copied in her hand, while others are associated more directly with other members of Jane Austen’s extended family than with Austen herself. There are albums which belonged to relatives she visited and with whom she shared music, and there are others that Austen would not have known at all.
The Austen family music collection allows us to see Jane Austen’s network of influences and relationships in a new light – not necessarily contradicting what is generally believed, but perhaps changing the emphasis. In this paper I will briefly explain the composition of the collection, and the challenges faced in researching the material for the cataloguing project I undertook from 2017 to 2021 for the University of Southampton Library. I will also touch on the relationships implied in the collection, for example where there is overlap which might indicate influence or shared interests between Austen and her extended family.