Studies of women musicians in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe have focused heavily on the conditions and discourses that placed – or sought to place – limitations on women's musical endeavours. This work has reached one broad point of consensus: while social, professional and discursive barriers were steadfastly present in women's musical lives, individual women were not always defined by them, and often escaped some of their constraints. Where women's voices and singing in particular are concerned, research on British and other European contexts has similarly discovered that women successfully contributed to musical life with great agency, despite ongoing efforts by some to limit or police how, when, and where women could do so.

In Sounding Feminine: Women's Voices in British Musical Culture, 1780–1850, David Kennerley adds important new details to this established picture of women's music-making and the discourses in which it operated during the period, while also focusing on the voice as a particularly contested site of femininity. In some areas of his study, he gently offers new, intriguing evidence that fills out aspects of the picture that have already been explored in related literature. For example, he asserts that matters of class and nationality often had a role to play in the discourse of women's voices and music-making and in how individual women viewed their own place within it. Elsewhere, however, Kennerley is strikingly innovative in the additional frameworks that he brings to the understanding of the topic, as well as in the source material that he deftly analyses.

First, Kennerley takes religious beliefs and identities within Britain during the period as often more strongly indicative of opinions on women's music-making and singing than other factors, whether as expressed by men or by women themselves. Kennerley offers a framework in which evangelicals during the period ascribed to the notion that the body is sinful, that music in general must be treated with care so as not to be morally corrupting, and that women should remain demure in the way that they use their voices, whether in speech or, especially, in song. Yet, while this evangelical attitude may have been the one most often expressed in conduct literature and some music criticism, it was far from dominating general social beliefs about women's voices and singing, nor did it circumscribe the singing lives of all individual women, amateur or professional. Instead, Kennerley identifies an opposing collection of religious identities through which women's vocality in speech and especially song was viewed affirmatively. While recognizing some important theological differences between the following groups, Kennerley asserts that Broad Church latitudinarian Anglicans, believers in ‘rational’ religion (such as Unitarians), High Church Anglicans, Catholics, and a few other non-evangelical groups tended to see the sensuous beauty of music as a gift from God worth appreciating largely without reserve. As a result, individuals and social groups located primarily within these spheres tended to be much more open to women who confidently used their voices, including in musical contexts involving very high technical skill and in a mixture of private and more public contexts. As Kennerley puts it, ‘these groups were much more affirmative in their support for the cultivation of the female voice, delighting equally in powerful, expressive, and highly trained voices whether on the opera and concert stage or in the home’. This view sometimes ‘hinted at the possibility of a more radical commitment to the empowerment of the female voice as a manifestation of women's capacity for self-expression and as a sound which deserved to be heard on equal terms with men’ (p. 22). In Kennerley's various case studies this religious framework then intersects in an illuminating manner with matters of class and nationality, as all three factors inflected the discourses on music and women's voices that coexisted at the time.

Second, Kennerley's book is remarkable in the way that it carefully analyses the very particular lives and social circumstances of specific women, many of whom were not well-known professional musicians. Kennerley has consulted an impressive array of published and unpublished letters, memoirs, diaries, and related unpublished documents in order to give “thick” descriptions of these women's musical activities and how they were viewed by the diverse people with which they associated. The depth of Kennerley's research and its great fruitfulness on these points are to be highly praised. Many of the people discussed in detail are far from being well-known historical figures, even if some of their memoirs and letters were already published during the period. Given how common it can be to chase down primary source material about personal music-making hoping to find insights, only to find nearly nothing of note, Kennerley's fine research instincts are truly impressive.

Following an introduction, the book is organized into five main chapters and an epilogue. While all of the chapters have important insights to offer, chapters 4 and 5 are especially strong, in part because in these two chapters Kennerley is in a position to make the most subtle explanatory use of the argumentative frameworks that are gradually established in the first three chapters. Chapter 1, ‘Instructing Women's Voices in Conduct Literature’, establishes the general tenor of evangelical-driven ‘conduct literature’ on how women should use their voices in both daily life and in musical contexts. This religious attitude combined with largely middle-class concerns about the proper education and priorities necessary for married life. Within this body of texts, women were instructed not to take too much time focusing on their accomplishments, so that they would be primarily prepared for the more important daily aspects of managing a household. Additionally, women were warned away both from public singing and from any kind of excessive display in performances in more private company. Given the worries that women could fall prey to vanity and other sins through singing, within this sphere certain music was also considered more appropriate than others for women's voices: for example, Handel's oratorios were to be cultivated, and Italian opera was considered inappropriate to be sung by or indeed, even enjoyed by women.

In chapter 2, ‘Encountering Women's Voices in Letters, Diaries, and Life-Writing’, we get our first extended window into how individual women negotiated their own relationship to music and their own voices within the frameworks so far established. The chapter presents us with three general scenarios in relationship to the stringent prohibitions appearing in the conduct literature of the period. Kennerley positions his examples on a spectrum ranging from evangelical ‘anxiety and restraint’, to a more middleground scenario, associated with women who were pressured to take evangelical prohibitions to heart but did not comply so easily, to ‘affirmation and celebration’, associated with women living in circles that allowed women's confident vocality to be praised. While all three scenarios are illuminating, Kennerley's account of the ‘conflicted middleground’ scenarios are especially compelling. To take one example, Kennerley focuses on Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne, who in her youth was very active in music, enjoying renown as a songwriter and ‘performer of Scots songs in a relatively relaxed moral environment’ (p. 66). Evidence from her later years shows that while she came to adopt more evangelical attitudes, her earlier love for even very sensuous music persisted; she had to fight her delight in it by turning directly to listening to sermons. Similarly, Kennerley finds within the diary of Elizabeth Fry (nèe Gurney) a case in which the young woman sought to live up to evangelical restraints but found it exceedingly difficult due to her own delight in music.

Chapter 3, ‘Criticising Women's Voices in the Musical Press’, covers more familiar territory by focusing on three operatic performers, their stage personas, and the critical reception that both constructed and reacted to these personas. Kennerley highlights the ways in which the critical reception of professional singing reflects the divergent moral outlooks on women's vocality coming from evangelical and non-evangelical circles, as well as the class make-up of various operatic publics and questions of nationality. He specifically focuses on the reception of Catherine Stephens, Eliza Vestris and Giuditta Pasta from the 1810s to the 1830s. Kennerley associates each singer's vocal sound with signature repertoire that he analyses according to the public persona of each singer. These musical examples, unlike the critical and personal descriptions of vocal sound on which the study otherwise relies, allow the reader to imagine the particular vocal skills and character of each singer in musical detail. Pasta proves to be an especially interesting study in this discussion of different expressions of femininity on the vocal stage, as she managed to succeed at such a high level as an artist – at least within non-evangelical circles predisposed to think well of Italian opera – as to practically escape gendered critical commentary in favour of genderless praise of the ‘science’ of her singing.

The next chapter of this book shines particularly bright. In chapter 4, ‘Dorothea Solly's Musical World: Class, Religion, and the Cultivation of the Female Voice’, Kennerley presents a brilliant micro-history of an amateur woman singer. Her family situation and her meaningful relationships with other amateur and professional musicians are illuminated through extremely detailed and subtle information concerning class position, religious identity, and related factors. Kennerley highlights from the start the fact that Solly does not fit many of the standard discursive stereotypes. Not only did she excel at Italian operatic music and take pride in this, with the clear encouragement of her family and close social circle, but for her this was no mere youthful accomplishment to gain a husband; she continued to pursue singing quite late into her mature married life. Through a careful study of Solly's parent's professional situation, income, religious affiliation and stated religious attitudes, her own differing financial situation with her husband and related religious identity, and similarly exact and subtle supporting detail from information about the family's closest associates, Kennerley establishes that Solly enjoyed her affirmative relationship with high-level Italianate singing in large part due to her status as a member of polite society that kept apart from, and even disdained, musically limiting evangelical attitudes. Towards the end of this case study Kennerley also brings in an account of Solly's relationship with her voice teacher, Cecilia Davies, who was a former operatic star championed by Johann Adolph Hasse. Solly contributed heavily to efforts to raise support for a pension for the retired professional singer, and reactions to that effort further show the fault lines between those in the community who affirmed women's high-level, confident singing – whether professional or amateur – and those who reacted negatively to Solly associating so wholeheartedly with the aging diva.

Chapter 5, ‘The Lives and Voices of Professional Female Singers: Three Vignettes’, provides an illuminating contrast between the public personas of three prominent women singers starting in the 1830s. Evidence from those singers’ letters and diaries show them to have struggled in various ways with the status of their vocality in British culture of the early Victorian period. As Kennerly explains, ‘such documents reveal starkly the problems of navigating and negotiating a route through the perils of a female singer's early career, illuminating in the process wider pressures and trends shaping British culture more generally’ (p. 159). Kennerley mentions that this generation of professional women singers had the new benefit of often having studied together at the Royal Academy of Music, and also, starting in 1839, the opportunity to join the Royal Society of Female Musicians; unfortunately, as we get into the discussions of the three profiled singers, this aspect of networked solidarity disappears from the discussion. With sensitivity to the self-fashioning nature of letter-writing, and, to a lesser extent, diary writing, Kennerley explores personal aspects of the careers of Adelaide Kemble, Clara Novello and Marianne Lincoln. The account of Lincoln's experiences as a young professional singer in a musical world still controlled by men is especially poignant, and maybe still all too familiar. When describing her experience working with Niels Gade and Ferdinand David in rehearsal in Leipzig in her diary, Lincoln complains about the frustrating situation of having her own interpretive ideas trampled upon by ill-considered and conflicting artistic advice given by the conductor and the concertmaster, even as she notes that she had to politely try it all out to not seem to be a ‘capricious’ woman singer or insubordinate as a young colleague (p. 177). The story is a reminder that even the most successful and essentially confident women artists of the period had to contend with the powerful figures and discourse working against them. The epilogue to the book considers again the national, British element in such examples, as well as the inclusions and exclusions associated with attitudes towards female vocality, especially where class and religion continued to be concerned in the later Victorian period.

While in some ways Kennerley's story feels like one that we have heard before, it is one that we also need to hear again. Kennerley not only brings important innovations to the study of women's music making and voices in the past, he also reminds us that the issue of women's voices – especially in the larger political and metaphorical senses of the word – is not fully settled on the side of women's truly equal position in various spheres of cultural life. For this and for its subtle analysis of women's agency within highly complex social settings and discursive attitudes, Kennerley's book makes a valuable addition to the ever-growing and evolving literature on women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music, the culture of vocal music in Britain in that period, and the question of gender and vocality.