Mary C. M. Phillips

During my research for Georgiana Darcy’s story in WHAT JANE AUSTEN DIDN’T TELL US!, I learned some things about Jane Austen, the pianist, which I’d like to share:     

Jane Austen studied piano until the age of 21, which would imply a serious interest in music and it was her custom to play every morning before she wrote.

Austen was particularly fond of the composer, Ignza Pleyel (a student of Haydn) whose work was described as possessing a “charm of simplicity and feeling.”

Today, I found it interesting and compelling, when listening to Pleyel’s Sonatina in D Major in its sonata form (exposition, development, and recapitulation), to imagine Jane Austen, the musician.  Did she, I wonder, internalize the sonata three-part formula for her stories?  Her novels, as we know, are in three-part volumes.  There are some that speculate that, in fact, she did.

In Pride and…