Dr Gillian Dooley

Nominated Fellow
Dr Gillian Dooley

Dr Gillian Dooley

Nominated Fellow, July 2023 and August 2024

Home Institution: Flinders University

Gillian Dooley is an Honorary Associate Professor in English at Flinders University, South Australia. She has published widely on various literary and historical topics. Her research interests include the works of Jane Austen, Iris Murdoch, V.S. Naipaul and J.M. Coetzee, as well as the life and work of Matthew Flinders, and she has published a number of books and essays on these topics. She has been active as an editor of both books and journals over the past twenty years. She was the founding editor of Transnational Literature from 2008-2018 and Writers in Conversation (2014-202). Influential scholarly editions include From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch (University of South Carolina Press, 2003) and Matthew Flinders’ Private Journal (Friends of the State Library of SA, 2005). She is the co-editor of a 2023 special issue of the EUP journal Romanticism on Jane Austen. Her research on Jane Austen often focuses on music in her novels and her world. She was co-convenor of the ‘Immortal Austen’ conference in Adelaide, July 2017. Her book She Played and Sang: Jane Austen and Music was published in March 2024. In 2022 she published two monographs: Matthew Flinders: The Man behind the Map and Listening to Iris Murdoch: Music, Sounds, and Silences. 

Gillian has presented many public lectures and keynotes on Murdoch, Austen, Flinders, Coetzee and Naipaul internationally over the past 10 years. In 2014 she was invited to present the Royal Society Matthew Flinders Memorial Lecture in Melbourne, Victoria. She was the keynote speaker both at the Iris Murdoch Centenary Conference at Oxford in July 2019, and at a conference in Czechia in June of the same year. In July 2023 she was a Nominated Fellow at IASH. She has served on the committees of conferences of the Musicological Society of Australia, the Bibliographical Society of ANZ, and SPACLALS. She is currently the Hon. Librarian of the Royal Society of SA, the Treasurer of the Musicological Society of Australia (SA), and the Chair of the Music Advisory Committee at Flinders University. 

Alongside her academic publications, she contributes to magazines, podcasts, and websites on her areas of interest. She was a regular book reviewer for Writers’ Radio, the Adelaide Review, and Australian Book Review for many years, and often writes reviews for various academic journals. As a singer she has been curating and presenting programs of music from Austen’s personal collection in Australia and overseas since 2007, and often incorporates performance into her presentations. In October 2020 she presented a concert titled ‘Jane Austen: the French Connection’ at the University of Adelaide, and in 2023 she presented a new program titled ‘Jane Austen’s Four Last Songs’. From 2017 to 2021 she created a detailed index of each of the 526 items in the Austen family music collections for the University of Southampton Library catalogue. Her Jane Austen’s music website includes lists of performances and presentations and articles, as well as information on the Austen Family Music Books https://sites.google.com/site/janeaustensmusic/home

 

Project title: Listening to Jane Austen and Iris Murdoch: Music, Silence, and Philosophy

My two most recent monographs, Listening to Iris Murdoch: Music, Sounds, and Silences (2022) and She Played and Sang: Jane Austen and Music (2024) are both broadly about the relationship between a celebrated writer and music in her life and work. As I look back on these two books, I am interested in teasing out some less obvious reasons why the two books are so radically different, and exploring some ways in which the authors’ knowledge of and attitudes to music interacted with their writing practices. 

I will also be working on two specific projects during my time in Edinburgh. One is the vestigial presence of music in Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey, and the other is a study of the opera Mansfield Park by Jonathan Dove and Alasdair Middleton as an adaptation of Austen’s novel. 

 

2023 Fellowship

Project Title: Music culture in Britain in the late Georgian period (1770-1820) as reflected in Jane Austen’s writings and music collection of the Austen family

In my forthcoming book She Played and Sang: Jane Austen and Music (Manchester University Press), I include a survey of British song in Austen’s surviving music collection, digitized by Southampton University Library, and in her fiction. So-called ‘Scotch airs’ were enormously popular during Austen’s lifetime. Given Austen’s well-known Jacobite sympathies, it is not surprising that she felt no impulse to resist this musical tide from the north. Her music collection shows that she was drawn to Scottish music, and two of the four songs her young relatives remember her singing in her later years were Scottish: ‘Their groves of sweet myrtle’ and ‘The yellow-haired laddie’ – the other two being respectively French, and English (by an Irish composer). Roger Fiske proposes that one of the reasons for the popularity of Scottish songs was ‘the piquancy of their Scots characteristics’. Other political or ideological reasons might be adduced, but these characteristics do set them apart from the common run of pastoral love songs and help to explain their attraction for Austen. Even if they were not all genuinely Scottish, the genre of ‘Scotch song’ allowed non-Scottish songwriters a certain licence to include musical and lyrical elements which would be thought out of place in the English ‘art’ song. During the eighteenth century, the melodies of Scottish songs found their way into sonatas, symphonies and overtures of composers based in England, and onto the London stage in ballad operas and plays. Arrangements of the tunes multiplied: among the sets of variations on pre-existing themes in the Austen collection, traditional tunes labelled as Scottish outnumber all other sources.