Music, History, Women, and Heritage

Tag: Brooklyn

Who was J. W. B. Garrett?

Who was J. W. B. Garrett, whom Augusta Browne married in September 1855, within weeks of first meeting him?

J. W. B. (John Walter Benjamin) Garrett was an artist who specialized in portraits, especially paintings made from small daguerreotypes, just as families today can commission a portrait to be painted from a photograph. Garrett had not trained as an artist and turned to painting around 1850, after chasing journalism and politics as a young man. John (J. W. B.) did not hail from New York. He arrived in Gotham during the summer of 1855, after traveling from Memphis, Tennessee, where he had recently lived and maintained a portrait studio.

A Room of Her Own in Nineteenth-Century America

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).

Colored photograph of Girton College, Cambridge
Girton College, Cambridge, England, ca. 1890–1900. https://www.loc.gov/item/2002696455/

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.

Broadway, Brooklyn, and Augusta Browne

When people pick up Augusta Browne: Composer and Woman of Letters in Nineteenth-Century America for the first time, they immediately express pleasure with the look and feel of the handsome book. Next, they ask about the image on the front cover: Where is that? What city is it? The caption for the vivid illustration is on the back cover, but many will ask before they turn the book over to look for the details. The image “Broadway, New York” Front Cover of Augusta Browne was the work of Thomas Hornor (1785–1844), an English surveyor, artist, and inventor.

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén