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Saint Clare November: 3500 / 50 000 words
Author’s Note:
This post started in another space as I tried to explain why I’m listening, over and over, to a playlist made especially for the Saint Clare world, how it’s constructed and why having it is important to the way I write and my ability to recapture the story’s moods. I’ve been using some version of this playlist (it started with Appalachian Spring something I’ve listened to and has been a favorite for as long as I can remember) since I returned to Saint Clare this past summer. For me, specific music creates and guides headspace, especially when it comes to writing. So this post has become a reflection on how music, for girls historically and for me personally, moves between structure and freedom—discipline as both enclosure and release.
So…
Imagine I’m standing at the gates of Saint Clare looking in. The key to entering is letting go of my academic voice and reclaiming and embracing Mija’s — one that’s curious, playful, and unhurried, that knows this is far more about the journey than the destination. This post is a kind of meta reflection, written as a map as I try to find a path back into the Saint Clare world, imagine it leading to a different sort of writing practice, one that can generate hundreds of thousands of words. Writing fiction at this scale isn’t only about research or structure — I’m terrible at structure. Instead it’s about mood, and sound. For me, that begins with an album or playlist that I play every time I want to be in that headspace. 1That much, the need connect specific music to specific writing, is also true for my larger pieces of academic writing These notes on music and discipline are about creating a state of calm focus, a rhythm — one where research and scholarship become texture for Saint Clare rather than, as they would with academic writing, constructing an argument. In this space, joy and rigor can share the same page — one, ideally, of discipline, structure, and pleasure.
These days when I think about the world of Saint Clare, I don’t begin with geography, plot, or even period. I begin with a sound. Not the bell (though there are bells enough in Saint Clare’s world) but a bow against a violin string — specifically my grandmother’s violin. The two told stories of how, when they first married (in the 1930s) she played for my grandfather in the evenings after dinner. While there was radio available, they didn’t have one yet. Nor any sort of record player. There was only the music she carried from her girlhood. She wasn’t especially musically gifted, though my grandfather claimed otherwise. Her father had been the true amateur musician, trained at Eton and Oxford, an organist and choir director who played faithfully for every parish he served. From him she inherited not virtuosity but devotion: the belief that to play faithfully, however simply, was a kind of gift and prayer.
Less than a hundred years ago that was what one did in the evenings: read aloud, practice music, keep culture alive by hearing it, playing it, creating it physically, and sonically. The bow against string, the pause before the note — gestures of steadiness, civility, and attention. Then too, in this world, silence still had somewhere to sit. I think of that quiet, live music as a discipline — the same sort that, in my imagination, fills the corridors of Saint Clare’s School for Girls. These gestures of steadiness, civility, and attention are precisely the point where structure meets possibility: the body obeys, but the mind has freedom and space to wander and imagine.
The Sound of Education
As I’ve said before, I’m not a visual person or thinker. Saint Clare manifested in my head as voices, music, not by what I imagined seeing, but hearing. The hum of a slightly out-of-tune piano before morning prayers mingled with the crack of hockey sticks on frost. The girls’ school, I realised, wasn’t merely an institution; it was an instrument, an intergenerational sonic landscape.
Victorians would have approved. When writing about education, they treated young girls and young, unmarried women as if they were violins in need of constant tuning to a pitch of virtue writ large. Erasmus Darwin (a less famous Darwin, quite enthusiastic about female education rather than beetles) proposed that girls could be improved through art and music.2 Darwin, Erasmus. A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education, in Boarding Schools. London: Gale and the British Library, 1797. Nearly a hundred years later, his theory is further refined with Isabella Tod, suggesting that a good education should teach girls “self-government.”3 Tod, Isabella M.S. “On the Education of Girls of the Middle Classes (1874).” In The Education Papers, 230–247. London: Routledge, 2013. An attempt to depict these ideals inspire and resonate in at Saint Clare, where musical and moral instruction have echoed one another across decades. Change comes to Saint Clare slowly.
By the late nineteenth century, the piano had become a kind of metronome of moral life in the British and American middle class. One unfortunate music master, a Mr. William Horsley, was specifically admonished that when teaching girls he should “refine rather than excite.”4 Woodall, Susan. “William Horsley: Music Master at Miss Black’s Boarding-School for Young Ladies, 1828–1840.” History of Education 38, no. 2 (2009): 169–189. Further, playing piano was seen as being as important to a girl’s formation as “playing the game” — generally, though not exclusively, hockey.5 McCrone, Kathleen E. “‘Playing the Game’ and ‘Playing the Piano’: Physical Culture and Culture at Girls’ Public Schools c. 1850–1914.” In The Private Schooling of Girls, 33–55. London: Routledge, 2023; McCrone, Kathleen E. Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women: 1870–1914. Routledge, 2024.
Both sport and piano supposedly taught posture, grace, and obedience in major keys. Posture, especially, was strictly enforced (that was true for working and writing at desks as well) – there was an expectation that learning demands a certain formality and even taming of the body. Imagine it: rows of uniformed girls seated like notes on a staff, their white cuffs flashing in 4/4 time (FWIW — this was what typing class was like in my girls’ school in 1982). Within these rigid compositions and structures, the players’ individuality flickers in small, syncopated rebellions that make the score human.
Much of girls’ musical training was mechanical — practice without imagination. Too, so much emphasis on the instrument had the inevitable consequence: warnings of the “piano plague,” a cultural hysteria over the idea that too much Chopin might unhinge the feminine nervous system.6 Kennaway, James. “The Piano Plague: The Nineteenth-Century Medical Critique of Female Musical Education.” Gesnerus 68, no. 1 (2011): 26–40.
Victorian social historian Laura Vorachek is more generous, calling piano “the instrument of the century,” seeing it as both a symbol of control and a portal to the unspeakable.7 Vorachek, Laura. “‘The Instrument of the Century’: The Piano as an Icon of Female Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century.” George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Studies 38/39 (2000): 26–43. Posture was strictly enforced (that was true for working and writing at desks as well) – the expectation that learning demands a certain Taken in total, what if the very thing meant to discipline girls became their rehearsal for freedom? This paradox, discipline and liberation, comes together as both education and creativity: the rules creates the space where improvisation and individuality occurs.
Listening as Reading
By the interwar years music was democratized, part of an “aesthetic education for all.”8 Jacobs, Andrea, and Joyce Goodman. “Music in the ‘Common’ Life of the School: Towards an Aesthetic Education for All in English Girls’ Secondary Schools in the Interwar Period.” History of Education 35, no. 6 (2006): 669–687. The ability to sing or play was no longer a mark of privilege but of civility. American seminaries transformed piano lessons into liberal arts, a call echoing through the pages of The Ladies’ Home Journal: to “put beauty into the world.”9 Smith, Jewel A. Transforming Women’s Education: Liberal Arts and Music in Female Seminaries. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019.; Vogel, Dorothy. “‘To Put Beauty into the World’: Music Education Resources in The Ladies’ Home Journal, 1890–1919.” Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 34, no. 2 (2013): 119–136. Admirable — and slightly exhausting.
Saint Clare’s still hums to that ideal. By 1955, a few of its girls may dream of university, careers, or scandalous continental travel, but beneath the chatter lies the old conviction: beauty is responsibility. One does not simply express oneself — one maintains form. Even the most rebellious pupil must find her pitch within the ensemble or she will not have a place to sing.
Modern critics ( both music and literary) remind readers that listening is a form of reading.10 Scher, Steven Paul. Music and Text: Critical Inquiries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; Kramer, Lawrence. Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002; Prieto, Eric. Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Kramer writes, “A song is a reading, in the critical as well as the performative sense of the term.” Which must mean, I assume, that a bad song becomes an unread essay. Not sure. His point, however, stands: that to listen with care is to think with rhythm.
The girls at Saint Clare learns that disciplined lesson early. To play scales is to practice patience. To sight-read is to anticipate. To sing to accompany another is to learn and practice empathy. Each act is moral training disguised as art. Miss Kelley, the English mistress, reads student essays as though they are quartets — marking time, shaping tone, and cutting sentimentality with a flick of her red pen. Terrifying.
Writing to Music: The Saint Clare Score (So Far)
Writing is, for me, composition by other means. I almost always listen to music as I write, the same music over and over. Of course, I can’t write while listening to music with lyrics — the words compete. Instead, I write through music, through its phrasing, its breath. My words aren’t lyrics to the music flowing through my ears, but theyresonate to them. The writing playlists I build and listen to over and over began as scaffolding: ways to hold the atmosphere steady, becoming a trigger to transport me into the world’s headspace.
I think of thos playlist as offering emotional scaffolding — sonic architecture for someone who isn’t especially visual. Each piece carries its own emotional tuning: serenity, discipline, wonder, longing, loniness. The sequence matters. Played in order, these tracks create for me a map of Saint Clare’s moods, tracing movements from calm to intensity and back again.
Playlist
Barber – Adagio for Strings – reflection and moral gravity
Copland – Appalachian Spring – clarity and renewal
Nyman – The Scent of Love – intimacy held in check
Marianelli – Dawn (Pride and Prejudice) – grace, hesitation, beginnings
Glass – The Poet Acts
John Williams – The Book Thief (Main Title) – courage in quiet
John Williams – The Visitor at Himmel Street
John Williams – Learning to Write
Preisner – The Secret Garden suite: “Awakening of Spring,” “First Time Outside,” “Skipping Rope,” “Mary and Robin Together,” “Taking Colin to the Garden”
Marianelli – Elegy for Dunkirk (Atonement) – beauty with cost
Navarrete – Pan’s Labyrinth: “Long, Long Time Ago,” “Pan & The Full Moon,” “Ofelia,” “A Princess,” “Pan’s Labyrinth Lullaby”
Welsh hymns: “Myfanwy,” “Calon Lân” – landscape, longing, belonging
Traditional – Ave Maria; Morning Has Broken
Note: much of this music comes from film scores. Perhaps that’s because cinematic music like Barber’s Adagio for Strings suggests reflection and moral gravity — the emotional hush after a difficult choice. Copland’s Appalachian Spring clears the air: a morning ritual of openness and renewal, day starting afresh. Nyman’s The Scent of Love speaks to me of intimacy, passion held in restraint, while Marianelli’s Dawn from Pride and Prejudice emotionally follows that because it hovers between courage and hesitation, for me very much the tone of Ned and Honour’s relationship. Glass’sThe Poet Acts keeps the rhythm of reflection. Preisner’s music for The Secret Garden is the sound of discovery and magic — of stepping into light after confinement, of finding hope and love in quiet. The Welsh hymns, Calon Lân and Myfanwy, are part of my choice to locate (at long last) Saint Clare in Wales (for reasons). They return the story hom and offer it landscape, longing, belonging.
Having this playlist helps me find the tonal contours of the world I’m writing — the rhythm of a morning assembly, the hush after evensong, the quiet defiance in a single note held a bit too long. Each piece imposes a kind of moral tempo — prose with a metronome. The sentences stretch or contract until they somehow match the score. My pen or cursor, I swear, keeps far better time than I do. Words and sounds blur for me; however, letters and words have colors, sometimes temperaments—’a’ in yellow-green, ‘s’ in red, ‘e’ in navy. The right music realigns those hues, letting sentences find their own tone and shade, creating mood.
Something that unites writing and music is the hand. The hand that writes a line and the hand that presses a key are kin. Both require restraint, both produce beauty through controlled pressure. Both, too, are inherited. A piano bench filled with sheet music, annotated in three different hands, is a family archive: crescendos pencilled by mothers, daughters, granddaughters, often playing on the same instrument. That continuity — the intergenerational sound — is what I want for Saint Clare. A place where practice, not perfection, is the virtue that survives.
Toward a Sonic Saint Clare
If Saint Clare has a moral key signature, it’s probably G major — good manners with one sharp edge. The school’s soundscape is moral but tender: the hum of girls in study hall, the echo after evensong, the tiny rebellion of a single note held too long.
I think again of my grandmother’s violin. Her playing was imperfect but faithful. That’s what I want my writing to be — not performance but practice. Not mastery but devotion. The quiet, stubborn act of putting beauty into the world, one measured line at a time.
Works Cited
Allis, Michael. British Music and Literary Context: Artistic Connections in the Long Nineteenth Century. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2012.
Correa, Delia da Sousa. George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Darwin, Erasmus. A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education, in Boarding Schools. London: Gale and the British Library, 1797.
Fuller, Sophie, and Nicky Losseff, eds. The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004.
Helsinger, Elizabeth. “Song’s Fictions.” The Yearbook of English Studies. 40, no. 1–2 (2010): 141–59.
Jacobs, Andrea, and Joyce Goodman. “Music in the ‘Common’ Life of the School: Towards an Aesthetic Education for All in English Girls’ Secondary Schools in the Interwar Period.” History of Education 35, no. 6 (2006): 669–687.
Kennaway, James. “The Piano Plague: The Nineteenth-Century Medical Critique of Female Musical Education.” Gesnerus 68, no. 1 (2011): 26–40.
Kramer, Lawrence. *Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History.* Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
McCrone, Kathleen E. “‘Playing the Game’ and ‘Playing the Piano’: Physical Culture and Culture at Girls’ Public Schools c. 1850–1914.” In The Private Schooling of Girls, 33–55. London: Routledge, 2023.
McCrone, Kathleen E. Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women: 1870-1914. Routledge, 2024
Prieto, Eric. Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.
Rumbley, Erica J. From Piano Girl to Professional: The Changing Form of Music Instruction at the Nashville Female Academy, Ward’s Seminary for Young Ladies, and the Ward-Belmont School, 1816–1920. PhD diss., 2014.
Ruwe, Donelle. “Mediocrity: Mechanical Training and Music for Girls.” In Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods, 163–188. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018.
Scher, Steven Paul. Music and Text: Critical Inquiries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Smith, Jewel A. Transforming Women’s Education: Liberal Arts and Music in Female Seminaries. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019.
Tod, Isabella M.S. “On the Education of Girls of the Middle Classes (1874).” In The Education Papers, 230–247. London: Routledge, 2013.
Vogel, Dorothy. “‘To Put Beauty into the World’: Music Education Resources in The Ladies’ Home Journal, 1890–1919.” Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 34, no. 2 (2013): 119–136.
Vorachek, Laura. “‘The Instrument of the Century’: The Piano as an Icon of Female Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century.” George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Studies 38/39 (2000): 26–43.
Woodall, Susan. “William Horsley: Music Master at Miss Black’s Boarding-School for Young Ladies, 1828–1840.” History of Education 38, no. 2 (2009): 169–189.
- 1That much, the need connect specific music to specific writing, is also true for my larger pieces of academic writing
- 2Darwin, Erasmus. A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education, in Boarding Schools. London: Gale and the British Library, 1797.
- 3Tod, Isabella M.S. “On the Education of Girls of the Middle Classes (1874).” In The Education Papers, 230–247. London: Routledge, 2013.
- 4Woodall, Susan. “William Horsley: Music Master at Miss Black’s Boarding-School for Young Ladies, 1828–1840.” History of Education 38, no. 2 (2009): 169–189.
- 5McCrone, Kathleen E. “‘Playing the Game’ and ‘Playing the Piano’: Physical Culture and Culture at Girls’ Public Schools c. 1850–1914.” In The Private Schooling of Girls, 33–55. London: Routledge, 2023; McCrone, Kathleen E. Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women: 1870–1914. Routledge, 2024.
- 6Kennaway, James. “The Piano Plague: The Nineteenth-Century Medical Critique of Female Musical Education.” Gesnerus 68, no. 1 (2011): 26–40.
- 7Vorachek, Laura. “‘The Instrument of the Century’: The Piano as an Icon of Female Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century.” George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Studies 38/39 (2000): 26–43.
- 8Jacobs, Andrea, and Joyce Goodman. “Music in the ‘Common’ Life of the School: Towards an Aesthetic Education for All in English Girls’ Secondary Schools in the Interwar Period.” History of Education 35, no. 6 (2006): 669–687.
- 9Smith, Jewel A. Transforming Women’s Education: Liberal Arts and Music in Female Seminaries. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019.; Vogel, Dorothy. “‘To Put Beauty into the World’: Music Education Resources in The Ladies’ Home Journal, 1890–1919.” Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 34, no. 2 (2013): 119–136.
- 10Scher, Steven Paul. Music and Text: Critical Inquiries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; Kramer, Lawrence. Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002; Prieto, Eric. Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.