Virginia Woolf wrote “A Room of One’s Own” to deliver in 1929 at Cambridge University for attendees of the two women’s colleges: Girton (est. 1869) and Newnham (est. 1871).
Woolf expanded the seven thousand-word essay into a monograph that remains a touchstone of the feminist movement. [see http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200791.txt]. Her argument asserted that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” The formula was much the same for a nineteenth-century female author, i.e., a woman needed to find money (have it, get it, or earn it) and a room of her own to enable her to write.
To paraphrase Virginia Woolf, American composer and author Augusta Browne (ca. 1820–82) did have a room of her own, although—like Emily Dickinson (1830–86)—it was in her parents’ residence.
Browne earned an income of her own, however modest, as a music instructor. Living in her parents’ home as an adult provided the respectability that was essential for a teacher of piano and voice in the parlors of leading families in New York and Brooklyn. After a decade as a published composer of songs and piano music, Augusta Browne burst into the literary community in 1845. During that single year, she published essays, poetry, and fiction in the Columbian Magazine, a New York monthly aimed at women and families at home.
What prompted this sudden blossoming from composer to writer?
In my opinion, it was gaining that room of her own.
A Room in the Family Home
Few women had the benefits of privacy and financial security in previous centuries. Woolf noted that while men were collecting incomes, or even fortunes, most women were accumulating children, and not just two or three, as in modern American families. A young woman who wed in her teens might easily bear ten or twelve children, and more was not unusual. Her energetic twenties and thirties were consumed with childbirth and child-rearing rather than accruing wealth. As Woolf put it, “to endow a college would necessitate the suppression of families altogether. Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children — no human being could stand it.”
According to the 1830 census, Augusta had two younger sisters in addition to six brothers (two older, four younger). In the modest buildings where the family lived in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, the Browne family ran their music shop and music academy on the ground floor while they resided on the upper floor or two. The parents probably had their own bedroom, the younger sons would have slept in another room, and the girls would have shared a third.
The Brownes were not wealthy, and the family moved often, always in search of better location or size. Space remained tight. Multiple pianos and music goods occupied the ground floor. Upstairs the family of ten or more could barely have fit around the table that served as dining area, reading venue, worktable, and center for entertainment as well as for family devotions. The small bedrooms would have been cluttered with beds and cupboards or storage chests for several siblings. Perhaps a chair could have been squeezed in, but a desk to write would have been unlikely.
Both of Augusta’s sisters died from infectious illnesses that were fatal in the eras before antibiotics. One sister succumbed as a young child in the mid-1830s. The other, Elizabeth, was a teenager when she fell ill of an infection—possibly encephalitis—in autumn 1841. Augusta’s first published prose may have been the obituary she wrote for Elizabeth, in which she proclaimed the embrace of salvation that the fourteen-year-old demonstrated in her final days (Christian Intelligencer, October 23, 1841).
According to the obituary, it was Augusta who “communicated the awful tidings” to Elizabeth that there was no further treatment or hope of recovery. She related deathbed scenes of her sister’s pain and prayers, writing, “If ever we felt thankful to the Lord for the blessed Bible, it was then, when we saw its power in sustaining a weak child in such circumstances: for what else could have comforted her?”
Elizabeth died shortly before daybreak, “but upon her astonished soul was bursting the morning of a glorious eternity.” Augusta concluded the obituary with lines by one of her favorite poets, Felicia Hemans, that celebrated “Thou art gone home!” a refrain from Mrs. Hemans’s poem, “The Two Voices.” The themes of salvation, eternity, and homecoming through death would reappear often in Augusta’s later music and prose.
The Lady’s and Gentleman’s Athenaeum
Within a few months of this obituary, Augusta Browne was named editor of the “musical department” for a planned literary periodical in Brooklyn, the Lady’s and Gentleman’s Athenaeum. With a fast-growing economy and population, Brooklyn was the third-largest city in the United States in 1860; it became a borough of New York City in 1898. The Browne family had moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn in January 1842, when Augusta began her position as organist at First Presbyterian Church (see Broadway, Brooklyn, and Augusta Browne).
The prospectus for the forthcoming Athenaeum asserted that its mission was the “elevation of the moral and intellectual tone of readers.” In February 1842, Lucian I. Bisbee (1807—88), mastermind of the nascent publication, wrote to Philadelphia writer and editor Rufus W. Griswold that the new Athenaeum would appear in a week or two. Bisbee hoped to commission biographical and critical essays for the magazine from contemporaries such as the journalist Horace Greeley. Bisbee asserted that the Athenaeum would embody higher literary aspirations than other popular household magazines, although it would retain appealing features such as “engravings & music (no fashion plates of course).” (Boston Public Library, Rufus W. Griswold Papers, 1834—1857, Box 1, Folder 57, Ms. Gris. 57 http://archon.bpl.org/?p=digitallibrary/digitalcontent&id=2219 Accessed July 6, 2017).
Bisbee was not new to magazine publishing. His New Monthly Magazine of European Polite Literature (ca. 1837—39) was an eclectic anthology of material pirated from British journals. He also initiated the Episcopal Family Monitor, a monthly magazine of pious reading for the parlor, in 1842. His wife, Maria E. Bisbee, provided stories and poems to the New York Visitor and Lady’s Album and other household monthlies of the 1840s.
The first publication of the new Athenaeum finally occurred during summer, 1842. The leading story, “Emily de Beauharnais. A Tale of the Time of Napoleon,” was historical fiction by Mrs. Bisbee that sketched the adult life of the countess Émilie Louise de Beauharnais de Lavalette, the niece of and lady-in-waiting to Napoleon Bonaparte’s first wife, Josephine.
A single issue survives at the New York Public Library; however, the music, table of contents, and engravings are missing. The premiere issue of the Athenaeum received muted recognition in East Coast newspapers. The lukewarm reception noted the crowded market for such home monthlies.
The new magazine lasted no more than an issue or two, but the seed was planted. When the Columbian Magazine (or Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine) made its debut in New York City in January 1844, Augusta immediately contributed music selections. During 1844 the Columbian included two of her songs and the Columbian Quick-Step for piano [https://bonnymillermusic.com/getting-to-know-…om-old-magazines/].
All the while she was preparing literary manuscripts for the magazine. Augusta initiated a torrent of prose in the January 1845 issue. She published several essays, a short story, a poem, and more music in the Columbian during 1845. For the rest of her life she would remain active in the periodical press with essays, music journalism, short stories, poetry, songs, and hymns in a variety of domestic magazines and newspapers.
A Room of Her Own
Augusta Browne had earned an income of her own from teaching and her sheet music publications from the time she was a teenager, but she didn’t have a bedroom to herself until Elizabeth passed away. Augusta was just making her entrée into the New York commercial nucleus at age twenty-one or so when she finally gained space for a desk along with the privacy that could foster writing. It was a sad means to obtain what Woolf called “a room of one’s own.”
Augusta repeatedly responded to the impetus of family deaths by turning tragic loss into creative works. She responded with poetry when her younger brother George Washington Browne was shot and killed during the Astor Place Riot (Shakespeare riots) in New York City in May 1849. He was one of twenty-some victims outside the Astor Place Opera House who died from bullets fired by police and local militia into crowds amassed from working-class followers of American actor Edwin Forrest versus British actor William Macready. “The Vacant Chair” mourned the youth gone missing from the family home.
The youngest family member, Hamilton (Alexander Hamilton Browne), succumbed to tuberculosis just a year later. Augusta mourned his loss in two poems that she republished several times in years to come: “The Heart and the World” and “Coelum et Terra,” variously retitled “Heaven and Earth,” “One Year,” or “One Year in Heaven.”
She also published a memoir, Hamilton, The Young Artist (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1852), that recounted how her brother’s Christian spirituality blossomed as his health declined. The “good death” and the embrace of salvation were themes that echoed the obituary she had written in 1841 for her sister Elizabeth.
Augusta married at around age thirty-five, notably late for a Victorian-era woman whom newspapers described as very pretty, intelligent, and modest. Despite many chances to meet suitable men at church, concerts, and among families whom she served as a teacher, Augusta apparently opted for a single life as a professional musician and writer.
She had already published a hundred music compositions, numerous essays, stories, and poems in periodicals, as well as her first book, when she married J. W. B. (John Walter Benjamin) Garrett, an up-and-coming portrait painter some five years her junior. Garrett’s abrupt death from heart disease in 1858 after just three years of marriage was a shock, but the bigger adjustment may have been how widowhood redefined her identity. She could not engage in teaching or visiting with individuals other than close family and friends during the long months of formal mourning.
Augusta published an anthology of condolence essays and poems soon after her husband’s death. Some of the contents were her own and others were taken from the works of British and American Protestant ministers. The collection of prose and poems offered comfort and condolence to those in loss. Compiling the work provided some solace during her first months of mourning.
Born of sorrow, The Precious Stones of the Heavenly Foundations became Augusta’s best-selling publication. The anthology of devotional writing received more than a dozen positive reviews. The book made a tasteful gift for adults or young people. The handsome volume for the parlor was widely marketed by the publisher. Many copies remain in the holdings of U.S. libraries. Despite this success, Augusta did not publish any new music for almost five years, an indication that she suffered prolonged depression in the wake of her husband’s loss.
Just as the forty-ish widow was reentering the musical life of Brooklyn, she had to cope with the maelstrom of the Civil War. Her two remaining brothers volunteered in the New York militia, leaving her alone to manage the household and care for aged parents.
The family left Brooklyn for Baltimore to reside with her younger brother William Henry Browne after he was seriously wounded in 1863. They moved again, to Washington, DC, after he gained a job in the patent office, but Augusta had to sacrifice her New York professional venue and colleagues as a result of these relocations. She never again advertised as a music teacher, but she valiantly continued to submit prose and music through correspondence with literary editors and sheet music publishers in distant states.
A Room in Another City
For some years in Washington, Augusta lived with her mother, brother William Henry, and their domestic maid, Sarah Morrow, on Third St. NW, a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol. In 1877, following her mother’s death and estate settlement, Augusta Browne Garrett applied for a building permit for a three-story brick dwelling to be constructed on K Street NW between 16th and 17th Streets. K Street is best known today as a haven for lobbyists and their office buildings, but following the Civil War, K Street was part of a growing new residential area northwest of the Capitol.
The new home featured a front bay window in a large parlor where Augusta could house her piano and organ. At last she was able to create her own room: a music studio space where she could play, sing, practice, compose, and write in a house that she shared with William Henry.
On the morning of January 11, 1882—the day when Augusta would suffer a fatal pulmonary embolism—she bubbled over with plans to mail a recent piece of music to Lucretia Garfield, widow of President Garfield, who had died the previous autumn from infected wounds following an assassin’s attack. William Henry completed her intention by writing a letter to Mrs. Garfield and enclosing the upcoming issue of Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine. The Sunday Magazine for February contained Augusta’s hymn setting, “Day of Judgment, Day of Wonders,” dedicated to President Garfield, as well as her final, eerily prescient essay, “The Blessed Company of All Faithful People.”
Mrs. Garfield responded by letter to William Henry, writing that the magazine article and music seemed not just a prophecy, but “almost a gift from the other world,” as she gracefully referred to the composer’s recent demise. Augusta’s article rejoiced that the “delight of reunion with the beloved of yore is doubtless among the ecstatic anticipations of heaven.” She also exulted: “We are assured by Scripture that music is one of the ineffable joys of heaven.” The composer envisioned an afterlife that would be filled with music and song. Indeed, Augusta Browne had already moved on to a different room of her own in that Scriptural “house with many rooms” (John 14:2).
Virginia Woolf was born in London on January 25, 1882, two weeks to the day after the death of Augusta Browne Garrett in Washington DC. A nineteenth-century voice went silent just as a twentieth-century literary icon began her path into print. The achievements of these two lives embody their personal solutions to the author’s—or almost any artist’s—dilemma to Woolf’s conundrum “about the room and the money.” In this twenty-first-century time of coronavirus pandemic and economic shrinkage, many writers have had to adopt the same strategy as Augusta Browne and Emily Dickinson: a room of their own in the family home.