Throughout nineteenth-century America, music production, proliferation and performance were commonplace. While recent works have started to look at aspects of these topics, there has been little exploration of private collecting, collating and cultivating individual music libraries. Candace Bailey seeks to address this in Charleston Belles Abroad, centering on Harriet Lowndes, her daughter Henrietta Aiken, and the writer Louisa Rebecca McCord, all from South Carolina's highly cultured southern elite. While the work concludes that understanding these women's music collections helps “to include a more nuanced approach to women's participation in the larger narrative” of American musicological-historical studies (219), Bailey's work presents a very gentrified narrative.

This is not an exploration of ordinary southern women, or of the urban northern middle classes singing around pianofortes. That is not to take away from Bailey's case studies, but the work is not fully reflective of the wider music culture with which Lowndes, Aiken and McCord interacted. Bailey explores each figure in turn and their extensive music collections, drawn from volume binders of song sheets, music scores and their own compilations held in Charleston Museum archives. Personal details appear, including reference to pencil marks on scores where the women would pause while singing, which show that this was living and used music. Bailey also describes the way pieces were bound together with decorative covers. These collections’ individual natures, along with their role as signs of high culture and wealth, come to the fore. The appendices of manuscript materials, composers and performers, and lists revealing the placement of operatic music and ballads in each volume, make this book a useful guide to mid-nineteenth-century American musical culture, highlighting the genres and pieces circulating around parts of the South.

Music source lists aid Bailey's repeatedly stressed central arguments. Lowndes, Aiken and McCord had strong connections to Europe, and the music that formed their cultural lives was European. German, French and Italian operas, pieces fresh from the printing presses across the Atlantic, concerts and performances that were, on some occasion, exclusive in the United States – such examples demonstrate how interconnected all three women were with the musical zeitgeist of classical and operatic culture, which Bailey notes marked them as being unique amongst their peers. The wider context of these European connections is explored through their familial roots, particularly Lowndes's and Aiken's French ancestors. All three women travelled on European tours in the 1850s, giving them firsthand experience of hearing, performing and buying the latest cultural and musical offerings of the day. Despite some common interests, “their music collections make evident that Harriet, Henrietta, and Louisa Rebecca did not speak with one voice. Their individual practices demonstrate the variation possible among a small group of women with many cultural similarities” (2), including variations in the prevalence of popular contemporary Irish and British Isle folk ballads within their classical and operatic collections.

For musicologists and cultural historians, Bailey's work offers much. The book is, however, focussed almost exclusively on the music collections. There is only brief discussion of the wider European history the women pass through, including tumultuous French and Italian revolts and nationalist uprisings, and America's own great civil conflict is muted except for reference to the fact that music collecting became harder during the war years. This is an issue, particularly when these women's backgrounds are considered. The book is about them and their personal cultural lives, yet it is impossible to ignore that their elite social standing was due to their position in the slave South. Lowndes was the daughter of a South Carolinian representative and wife of the state's governor. Their daughter was married to a Confederate officer who was the son of the ardent pro-slavery secessionist Senator Robert Rhett. Apart from a fleeting visit to the McCord's familial home – the musically entitled Lang Syne plantation – the fact that all of these women were connected to slavery is a noteworthy absence. Given the persistent need to emphasize slave presence, and the comparable aspects of Bailey's work on gender studies of southern plantation and slave-owning women, it is an uncomfortable omission. Slavery's silence reveals a tension in some of Bailey's arguments; it would be good to see acknowledgment of the wider southern cultural context in relation to slave-owning to ease its exclusion.

This is a book about music collecting and not a wider history of the Lowndes, Aiken or McCord families, but Bailey does present elements of the women's lives alongside their collections' song titles. One of the work's strengths is detail on the musical upbringing and influences that shaped the production of each scorebook and song sheet binder. Lowndes and Aiken are compelling because they are mother and daughter and visited Europe more, whereas McCord's musical interests are emphasized by comparison to analysis of her social circles. There are speculative suppositions about some individual music performances, practices and the role of music binders that seem frustrating, but as this book advances studies of individual music culture development, Bailey must be applauded for her innovative approach. For those interested in the publication, dissemination and collection of music within transatlantic culture, this narrow focus on three antebellum South Carolinian women's musical interests is recommended and it certainly provides a foundation for further study.