JASP 2025: Interview with Laura Klein
- Delicia Johnson
- 2 days ago
- 9 min read
In anticipation of JASP 2025 we’ll be interviewing our esteemed staff and speakers. This year’s four-day symposium, JASP 2025: Sensibility and Domesticity, will take place June 19-22, 2025, in historic New Bern, North Carolina. We'll be focusing on Austen’s first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, and considering the birth of her career as a published author and taking a transatlantic look at the world into which she was born. Program topics include medicine, birth, and domestic arts in Regency England and colonial North Carolina. We’ll be covering the aforementioned topics and celebrating Austen’s 250th birthday through a wide range of activities including workshops, small-group discussions, and workshops. And of course, our Regency Ball is an event not to be missed!
Our final interviewee is JASP 2025 speaker, Laura Klein. She will be giving a lecture recital titled “Sense and Sensibility in Song". Laura is currently working on a PhD in historical musicology and performance practice at The University of Colorado Boulder. Her research focuses on 18th century British keyboard music and dissemination of music of the British Isles. Laura founded The Austen Playlist in 2019, in which she researches and performs music contained in the Austen Family Music Books.
Laura was featured in our Janeite Spotlight project and gave a talk titled 'From Air to Arrangement: The Evolution of Keyboard Music in Austen’s Era' as part of Jane Austen & Co.'s 'Music & the Regency' series.
Will this be your first time attending JASP?
Yes! Even though it’s in North Carolina where I grew up, I haven’t had the chance to attend until now. I have a 12-year-old, and my husband travels for work quite a bit. I’ve also traveled the past several summers for research, which has conflicted with the dates. So I’m excited to be able to come this year.
There was one question I really wanted to ask as a follow-up in your Jane Austen & Co. talk, but I was thinking that I may not like the answer. So I absolutely love the soundtrack for 1995’s Sense and Sensibility. I even have it on vinyl. How accurate is the music in that adaptation?
There are moments. It doesn’t always follow the compositional and stylistic practices of the time. That being said, ‘Weep You No More Sad Fountains’ with music composed by Patrick Doyle is a 17th-century text that was originally set to music by John Dowland.
It’s not the closest to being accurate, but it’s also nowhere near the worst. In my opinion, none of the adaptations get it exactly right. But there are some that get it closer than others. Sense and Sensibility takes liberties, but I think it works in the way the film is trying to bring out the Romanticism of the novel. And I can’t imagine that movie without the soundtrack—it’s one the most beautiful of the Austen adaptation soundtracks.
Your point about the Romanticism is interesting. I imagine filmmakers struggle with Sense and Sensibility because of the pairings, especially Marianne and Colonel Brandon. So it’s interesting that the music is used in the film to bring out that Romanticism underneath the surface of the text.
Romanticism as a movement entered novel writing before it did the music. I won’t go into too much of the score here, as one of my friends and colleagues is actually speaking about this very topic at JASP, but I think that one of the most interesting things coming from a music standpoint is that the film has so many Romantic tendencies. Because of the heartbreak that Marianne encounters—the tragedy that Austen introduced in the novel even though it ends “happily ever after”—the bent towards Romanticism gives it the freedom to have the soundtrack that it does. but Patrick Doyle comments that he wrote it to sound “suppressed” with “occasional outbursts of emotion.”
What is your JASP 2025 lecture about?
I’m giving a lecture recital, “Sense and Sensibility in Song,” that examines 18th and 19th century music in the collection of the Austen Family Music Books. One of the fascinating aspects of the music in the collection is how they parallel so many of Austen’s scenes, which demonstrates how much music permeates our creativity and industry. In my program, I will be sharing a few songs that Austen collected and played while she wrote S&S and tell parts of the story through song. I will also highlight a few songs that made their way over to the colonies after their popularity in England during Austen’s lifetime.
What other activities are you looking forward to?
The ball! I stumbled into English country dancing a few years ago through a group in Denver and since then have come to adore English Country Dance.
Do you enjoy Sense and Sensibility?
I love Sense and Sensibility! As far as Austen’s characters, I relate the most to Elinor Dashwood. Overall, I love the story. I love witnessing Marianne’s growth and the close relationship she and Elinor share. Throughout the novel, there is so much that is relevant today in how we grow and discover things about ourselves.
Returning to music for a moment, music plays a vital role in this novel. I’m in the process of working on a paper about how the music demonstrates the early 19th century view of “sense” and “sensibility.” In this novel especially, Austen highlights the importance of music. For example, Marianne sitting at the piano and pouring out her grief. The piano becomes a character of itself for sensibility. That’s one of the things I love about Austen’s writing. She put so many clues that are in plain sight and it’s so rewarding when you find them. There are aspects and characters that I love in each of her novels.
Even Mansfield Park?
Yes, even Mansfield Park. I can appreciate Fanny Price in many ways. As a child I was very much like Fanny. When I read Mansfield Park as a child, I felt like I understood her and who she was as a person, which validated me and my personality in return.
You mentioned how you relate to Elinor. Do you have any other favorite characters or any lines or passages you particularly enjoy?
I especially appreciate the way Austen writes Colonel Brandon – he is one of the characters I would like to meet. I get the biggest kick out of Mrs. Jennings. While I mentioned that I related to Fanny Price’s personality as a child, I related to Marianne as a young adult because the piano was where and how I expressed my emotions. Anytime I needed to cry, work out my feelings, or find my voice, I would sit at the piano. The passage where Marianne spent all evening at the piano alternating between her tears and her grief is one in which I have deep personal connections. Although I think some of that is dramatized by Austen there is such a reliability in that to me. I love that scene.
There is also that scene where Marianne is playing at Barton Park and is subsequently annoyed by the groups’ effusive praise. Colonel Brandon alone demonstrates his excellence in taste for music because he doesn’t fawn over her. As a pianist myself sometimes it feels like the sincerest compliment is when someone expresses their appreciation of my playing simply instead of gushing. As someone who is more passionate about the music than about the attention that playing it brings, I feel this passage very personally.
What do I love about Jane Austen and her works?
I’ll focus on the musical aspect. Austen doesn’t give her characters extreme musical accomplishments. The ones you see being very musically accomplished or talking about how they should be musically accomplished are the characters we’re not supposed to like very much. Characters like Lizzie or even those like Elinor or Fanny who don’t even play, Austen chooses not to ascribe musical accomplishment as a marriageability aspect. Instead of making Lizzie musically accomplished she makes her very obviously not musically accomplished. In this way, Austen allowed music and her heroines to have their own merit. I think this speaks to the bigger picture of Austen note conforming to the expectations of the day in the type of novel that should be written or the way that women should be written into a novel. I think it also speaks to the brilliance of her ability to subtly weave these themes into her novels while still writing novels that were widely accepted in her era. This is certainly an aspect that has endured since. There is such a vast number of layers in her work that we still don’t fully appreciate. The genius of Austen sounds cliché, but we all know and agree that she was one.
Why is Jane Austen important?
To put it simply, I believe she is important because she didn’t just accept what life handed her. She took her life and her choices into her own hands despite the restraints she faced as a woman. I think that’s such a powerful message even today, especially for women- taking hold of what you want and not just waiting for life to give you a happy ending or wait for opportunities to fall into your lap. And Austen not only demonstrates this in her stories, but so many times in her own life as well.
What was it like performing at Jane Austen's House and Chawton House?
It was incredibly surreal. When I visited Jane Austen’s House the first time in 2018, I emailed ahead and asked about playing at the House. They responded that I was welcome to. When I arrived, I started playing the piano and a crowd gathered behind me. By time I was done the drawing room was packed. A volunteer later told me they have Austen’s music there, which was where the journey of developing The Jane Austen Playlist began. I have since kept in touch with them and have been back several times. Every time I am there, it feels like I’m supposed to be there. It’s a safe space. It’s powerful every time I’m there at the piano to know that it is the place where she practiced. When I was at the House for my Reimagine Residency in January 2023, I was there to practice at 7am every morning before the House opened and it was fresh in my mind every day that this is exactly what Jane would do. She would get up in the morning before everyone woke up and practiced.
Playing at Chawton House was also amazing. I was there when one of the missing volumes of music bearing Austen’s signature was restored to Chawton and I spent a day playing the piano in the dining room. While it wasn’t the piano she played, it was the space in which she would spend time with her family, including her nieces who also played. In a way, playing at both places brings forgotten memories of the music out of the woodwork into the space for me to experience.
Images from Chawton House and Jane Austen's House
I want to go back to a term you used- safe space. Do you feel that Jane Austen provides a safe space for a lot of people?
One of the things I have been researching recently is this idea of space in the 18th century. I gave a talk recently about escapism and how Austen provides escape into a space of one’s choosing. For me, reading even one paragraph of Austen is a way of putting myself in a safe space despite the chaos or stress of life; it also gives me the grounding that allows me to reenter the chaos of real life again and feel like I have some grounding.
Regarding music, space was such an important component of music making – both the physical and the ethereal. Public spaces, private spaces, shared spaces – music and the experiences of sound in space has always carried power and meaning. Austen shares this in the spaces she creates around music in her novels and I believe this was a way of extending her own various experiences with music into the words she put down on paper. Bringing us back to Sense and Sensibility, space is an unmentioned aspect of music-making that the characters experience in some form or fashion, facilitated by Marianne’s various times at the piano. Sometimes it is safe, sometimes it is threatened. But the music is a safe space for Marianne even when the atmosphere around her is threatening.
Why should people attend JASP?
To join with a group of wonderful people who are passionate about Jane Austen! There is something incredibly powerful about coming together to celebrate Austen and our experience as lovers of Austen here in the United States. The more I’ve gotten to know the people within the organization of JASP, I’ve found them to be warm, passionate, and very engaged with their work and with the community of fellow Austen scholars and enthusiasts. My experience with JASP so far is that it is centered on the community and people being engaged with the organization in various aspects. I also love the variety of focuses, both scholarly non-scholarly, which brings a multifaceted experience of Jane Austen to all those involved.
What are you working on throughout 2025?
I’m going to England and Scotland to do some performances and research. I am at the dissertation stage of my PhD, which will use the music in the Austen family collection to explore and examine 18th and early 19th century British keyboard music and its place in the larger canon of Western music in Europe and the United States colonies.
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