Hello again, dear readers! This year, we’ve begun a blog series highlighting Austen-lovers around the world—sharing how they first discovered Austen’s fiction, why they love Austen, how they’ve contributed to the Janeite community, you get the picture. Fans, who cultivate and engage in discourse surrounding Austen’s life and fiction, participate in workshops and conventions, host book clubs, and don I ❤️ Darcy merchandise with pride (but hopefully not prejudice—wink, wink), are the reason Jane’s spirit survives in the twenty-first century. We deserve a shout-out! And we deserve the chance to connect with like-minded individuals across the world. This week, we’re highlighting Laura Klein, a music professor and PhD student with a passion for the piano and all things Jane Austen, including the Austen family music collection.
Laura Klein has been an avid reader for as long as she can remember. She was named after Laura Ingalls Wilder, her mother’s favorite author, and as a girl, her grandmother introduced her to the novels of other female writers like Louisa May Alcott, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and Gene Stratton-Porter. She discovered Jane Austen by accident while looking for more of Alcott’s novels on the shelves of her local library (their surnames appeared next to each other).
Laura checked out Emma and Pride and Prejudice and was quickly hooked. “The funny part of this story,” Laura confides, “is that as a child, I grew up in a conservative community that disdained novels due to their impressionable impact on young girls’ minds…. I was a terrified of ‘breaking rules,’ but I loved literature so much that my one act of rebellion was sneaking novels into my stack of biographies and nonfiction loans.”
Imagine that—deemed a “bad girl” for reading classic novels!
As a girl, Laura immediately recognized kindred spirits in Austen’s more introspective characters like Fanny Price and Anne Elliot. But she was also drawn to Austen’s stronger heroines, like Elizabeth Bennet and Elinor Dashwood, who were sources of inspiration as she sought to find her voice as a young adult. As an adult, Laura deeply values the impact of Jane Austen’s writing on her personal maturation and development, and she increasingly admires Austen as a woman who lived her life despite society’s gendered expectations and restrictions.
Currently, Laura works as a professional pianist and affiliate music faculty at Colorado Christian University in Denver, where she teaches piano and piano literature. In 2019, she founded The Jane Austen Playlist, a historical music project featuring the music of the Austen family in modernized scores, companion recordings, and dramatically narrated performances. This work inspired her to pursue her current PhD program in musicology at the University of Colorado Boulder, with an emphasis on historical and performance practice of eighteenth-century British keyboard music. Her research centers on the Austen Family Music Books collection.
In 2023, Laura participated in the JASNA AGM as a breakout speaker; her paper “Pride and Prejudice and the Piano: Pianofortes and Music in Jane Austen’s Life and Work” recently appeared in the 45th issue of Persuasions. For the same AGM, she was commissioned to create a world-premiere performance of The Jane Austen Playlist: Pride and Prejudice. (Her first dramatized production, The Jane Austen Playlist: Love and Music of Regency England, premiered in 2022 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.) This program adapted Pride and Prejudice using the music Jane Austen collected and played, complete with a costumed cast of singers, instrumentalists, a narrator, and a beautiful eighteenth-century Stein pianoforte. More recently, she collaborated with Gillian Dooley at the 2024 AGM in Cleveland, OH, where they performed a program on the theater music contained in Austen’s music books. Their joint article “Drama in Words and Music: Jane Austen Sings: A Program of Theatre Music from the Austen Family Music Collections” appears in the most recent issue of Persuasions On-line.
Like former Janeite Spotlight interviewee Donna Chaff, Laura shares a special relationship with Jane Austen’s House in Chawton, Hampshire. Her first visit was in 2018, where she spent over an hour playing the square piano in the drawing room, and she has since been back to perform two recitals. She has also performed several times virtually, beginning on Valentine’s Day in 2021. In the spring of 2023, she was invited to be a Reimagine Resident; her residency included the completion of Pride and Prejudice-inspired playlists, including an exclusive live performance on Pride and Prejudice Day, January 28, 2023.
In the summer of 2023, Laura returned to Chawton to give a performance with Dr. Gillian Dooley for the Hampshire branch of the Jane Austen Society, and she had the incredible opportunity to handle and play from Jane’s recently rediscovered personal music book, A Select Collection of Choice Music for the Harpsichord or Pianoforte, compiled by Domenico Corri.
“The more time I spend with Austen and the vast amount of output from scholars and experts over the past century, the more I appreciate the vast scope of her relevance,” Laura says. “The aspect that speaks to me the most is how she balanced the social, political, and moral restrictions of her time; through her subtle commentary and study of human nature, she effectively transformed the novel and set the stage for how we engage with literature, even now. Furthermore, her appeal reaches a wide scope and variety of fans; for this reason, I have made connections with many that I wouldn’t have originally expected…. On a more personal level, I continue to find that she is relatable in every stage of life. Having engaged with Austen since girlhood, she and her characters are old friends. Every reread brings new insights and glimpses into understanding her as a woman of intelligence, education, and brilliant creativity, something quite remarkable for her era.”
Back home, Laura is the recording secretary and social committee chair for the JASNA Denver/Boulder region. This year, she also presented at VirtualJaneCon performed a virtual concert for The Jane Austen Literacy Foundation. She is looking forward to several more exciting projects in 2025.
Going forward, Laura would like to promote Austen’s renown not only as an author but also as a musician throughout the Janeite community. She loves connecting with other Austen enthusiasts and scholars through her local JASNA branch, AGMs and festivals, email, and social media. “My favorite Austen quote,” she tells me, “which has become a mantra for me over the past 20 years, sums up my transformation nicely. ‘We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.’”
Excerpted from email correspondence with Laura Klein, June 3, 2024.
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