Emerging in the 1850s, elocutionists recited poetry or drama with music to create a new type of performance. The genre—dominated by women—achieved remarkable popularity. Yet the elocutionists and their art fell into total obscurity during the twentieth century.

Marian Wilson Kimber restores elocution with music to its rightful place in performance history. Gazing through the lenses of gender and genre, Wilson Kimber argues that these female artists transgressed the previous boundaries between private and public domains. Their performances advocated for female agency while also contributing to a new social construction of gender. Elocutionists, proud purveyors of wholesome entertainment, pointedly contrasted their "acceptable" feminine attributes against those of morally suspect actresses. As Wilson Kimber shows, their influence far outlived their heyday. Women, the primary composers of melodramatic compositions, did nothing less than create a tradition that helped shape the history of American music.

| Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Preface: Hearing Lost Voices Acknowledgments 1. The Odyssey of a Nice Girl: Elocution and Women's Cultural Aspirations 2. Making Elocution Musical: Accompanied Recitation and the Musical Voice 3. Reading the Fairies: Shakespeare in Concert with Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream 4. Sentimentality and Gender in Musically Accompanied Recitations 5. Grecian Urns in Iowa Towns: Delsarte and The Music Man 6. In Another Voice: Women and Dialect Recitations 7. Womanly Women and Moral Uplift: Female Readers and Concert Companies on the Chautauqua Circuit 8. Multiplying Voices: American Women and the Music of Choral Speaking 9. Words and Music Ladies: The Careers of Phyllis Fergus and Frieda Peycke 10. Women's Work, Women's Humor: Musical Recitations by Female Composers Afterword: Echoes of Elocutionary Arts Appendix: Accompanied Recitations of Jane Manner Notes Index |

"An extraordinarily detailed account....Through a great deal of archival research, excellent organization of the text, an incisive and fluent writing style, a clear understanding of the social and artistic scene during the Gilded Age and beyond, and careful documentation, the author has vividly described one important facet of 'women's aspirations to the world of high art.'" —Music Reference Services Quarterly

"Beautifully designed. . . . Such a carefully researched and highly readable study of women's recitation is captivating and sorely needed."—American Music
"Wilson Kimber's writing is as engaging as it is meticulous, her research rich and nuanced but clear as a bell."—Iowa Public Radio
|Marian Wilson Kimber is an associate professor of music at the University of Iowa.