Music in Jane Austen's Emma

Abstract

Jane Austen played the piano every morning before the rest of the family got up - both for her own pleasure and probably also as an aid to meditation and mental focus. No one has yet fully explored the significance of music to her as a writer, but the use of music in her novels - as with all other aspects of daily life - is hardly casual. In perhaps no other novel is this so true as in Emma, in which music is used in a sophisticated manner to evoke class and gender status and as a pointer to moral character.