Who was Lady Augusta Browne? Not the American Composer.

The American composer Augusta Browne was not Lady Augusta Browne (1838–1909), ninth child and sixth daughter of Howe Peter [Browne], 2^nd Marquess of Sligo (1788–1845). A photograph of Lady Augusta Browne is frequently displayed and misidentified as an image of the composer. The two unrelated women were born in Ireland almost twenty years apart. Lady Augusta Browne sat for portraits and photographs because she was a member of the minor British peerage in Ireland. Her carte-de-visite from the 1860s belongs to the National Portrait Gallery in London. Lady Augusta Browne never married and led a quiet life in Westport, County Mayo.

Augusta Browne, the musician and author, was born in Dublin around 1820 and came to North America with her family in 1821. “Miss Augusta Browne” composed and published musical works during the 1830s in Philadelphia and the 1840s in New York, where she lived and worked for a quarter-century.

Sadly, no authentic photograph, image, or portrait of the composer has been located to date, even though her husband, J. W. B. Garrett, was a portrait painter. His portrait of William Henry Browne, the composer’s younger brother, was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1857. It seems likely he would have made a portrait of Augusta as well, but no evidence proves its existence. William Henry mentioned “family portraits” in early versions of his will but gave no further details. Augusta Browne Garrett’s family line ended in 1976 with the death of her grand-niece Marion Browne Phinney. Even if a portrait or family photograph of the composer still exists, it may lack identification. We may never locate an authentic image of the musician Augusta Browne.

Mistaken Identities

Lady Augusta Browne is not the only individual who is mistaken for the musical Augusta Browne. Additional women with somewhat similar names have also been muddled with the Irish-American musician.  

Harriett Mary Browne (later Hughes, then Owen; 1798–1858) was already confused with Augusta Browne in the United States during their lifetimes. Works by the English “Miss Browne” (i.e., Harriett) are still attributed to the American “Miss Augusta Browne,” despite longstanding clarification by Judith Tick and myself. The American composer signed her works “Miss Augusta Browne,” in a deliberate manner to avoid this mistake. The English songwriter often omitted her name altogether, and publishers usually listed her as “Mrs. Hemans’ sister.” She indeed set many texts by her famous sister, the poet Felicia Browne Hemans. If the words Hemans and sister appear on a piece of sheet music, the composer was Harriett Browne and not Augusta Browne.

A young musician in Cleveland in the 1840s also bore the name Augusta Brown. She was part of a musical family from Ohio that performed in concerts during 1846. A newspaper announcement for a “musical soiree” to be presented October 28, 1846, lists songs, duets, and piano solos performed by Augusta, Caroline, and Clara Brown. Among the music was “The Season Waltzes,” composed by Augusta, “aged 13.” The age of the child and names of other family members demonstrate that this is not the Irish-American composer, then in her mid-twenties.

A nineteenth-century writer easily confused with the composer is Helen Augusta Browne, an author of sentimental poetry in the US during the 1850s and ’60s. She published poems in the Peterson Magazine, a women’s and family magazine similar to periodicals that printed music, poems, and essays by Augusta Browne.

Family Matters

The composer’s full name was Susan Augusta Browne, although she never used that first name, which only appears in the US census returns late in her life (1870 and 1880). As with many European clans paying tribute to relatives and royalty by baptizing children with a long string of names, it was practically a Browne family tradition not to use one’s first name. Three of Augusta’s siblings had full names that they didn’t use: George Washington Browne preferred Washington. Alexander Hamilton Coates Browne, her youngest brother, went by Hamilton. And a third brother, Arthur St. John Browne, customarily used St. John.

It’s not surprising that the budding composer preferred the more impressive and regal-sounding Augusta. The first time her given name appears in print is an 1837 advertisement in the Philadelphia Inquirer for new music by “Miss Augusta Browne,” published by George Blake. The composer was sixteen or so by this time and had decided on the name she preferred to use for the rest of her life.

Another Augusta Browne was the composer’s niece, Augusta Emily Browne, the daughter and only child of the composer’s oldest brother, Louis Henri Browne (1813–1875), a piano builder in Boston. Born about 1853, little Augusta was listed as Emily as early as the 1855 Massachusetts state census. She identified herself as “Emily A.” as a student, then as a primary school teacher, and later as the wife of Joseph M. Ballard (1853–1909), a pharmacist who, together with Emily, operated a drug store in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

One of Augusta Browne’s books, Hamilton the Young Artist (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo &Co., 1851), was her memoir of Hamilton Browne’s character and premature death at age twenty. A copy of the book with a handwritten inscription by Augusta to her brother Louis Henri “from his aff.^te [affectionate] sister the Author” belongs to the University of Wisconsin art library. The light penciling beneath the inscription indicates “To be sent to Historical Society of Madison, Wisc[onsin].”

On another page of front matter, a small, handwritten notation in black ink—“Estate of Emily A. Ballard”—confirms that, yes, family artifacts may still emerge, perhaps even a portrait.