Volume 64, No. 2

Abstract

In an 1882 article in the American suffrage newspaper, The Woman’s Journal, Thomas Wentworth Higginson expressed outrage that the Mendelssohn family had discouraged Fanny Hensel from composing and that her music had been published under Felix Mendelssohn’s name. Not a musician but a noted literary critic, Higginson is best known as the earliest editor of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. His later writings continued to disseminate his views on Hensel, based mainly on a review of her son Sebastian Hensel’s history, The Mendelssohn Family. Higginson and other writers helped to construct a narrative about Hensel in the decades before 1920. The composer was simultaneously portrayed as proof of women’s compositional abilities and as a victim whose supposedly limited output reflected familial and societal constraints. Higginson’s treatment was echoed in other pro-suffrage publications, including three articles by Alice Stone Blackwell. Confusing “song” with “Song without Words,” Higginson also furthered the incorrect notion that Hensel had composed some of her brother’s Lieder ohne Worte, an idea that was widely circulated. In 1891, novelist Molly Elliot Seawell, arguing against Higginson’s belief in women’s talents, found that the character pieces’ “sickly sentimentality” suggested they were indeed composed by Hensel. Although Hensel’s actual music remained largely unconsidered, she became a symbolic figure used to argue for women’s intellectual equality, and her story, along with its inaccuracies, was transmitted through the discourse surrounding the political struggle for women’s suffrage in America.

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That Fanny Mendelsohn Hensel was both a notable pianist and a composer was only occasionally reported beyond her immediate circle during her lifetime.^[1] For example, J. T. [John Thomson], “Notes of a Musical Tourist,” The Harmonicon 8, no. 6 (March 3, 1830): 99. However, late nineteenth-century America saw a tremendous increase in the amount of published commentary about the musician, most frequently due to her status as “Fanny Mendelssohn,” the sister of the better-known Felix. Hensel was often mentioned in books, magazines, and newspapers, sometimes entirely apart from her brother. Most of this writing was produced by non-musicians for general and women’s publications, which circulated knowledge of Hensel to the public beyond specialized music journals and brief listings about her in biographical dictionaries of musicians. However, the composer’s output, very little of which was available at the time, was rarely discussed. ^[2] Hensel had only begun to publish her works a year before her death in 1847; several additional works were issued by her family. Instead, period publications typically told the story of how Hensel was discouraged from composing and/or publishing by the Mendelssohn family. Any inclusion of her music was inevitably to emphasize that it had been published under Felix’s name, an assertion based on the appearance of Hensel’s songs in Mendelssohn’s opp. 8 and 9. Although a few articles mentioned Hensel’s piano music and additional songs, readers could easily come to assume that her only compositions were those that lacked any identification of her authorship. Many writers incorrectly claimed that Hensel had actually composed some of her brother’s popular Lieder ohne Worte.

This article posits that Hensel’s emergence as the central character of a feminist cautionary tale, an unrecognized genius whose talents were suppressed by her family, was part of the widespread discourse about women’s intellectual abilities that emerged in the late nineteenth century. My purpose is not to revisit the available historical information about the role of the Mendelssohn family in Fanny’s musical life. ^[3] See R. Larry Todd, Fanny Hensel: the Other Mendelssohn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 47–49, 208–9, and 315–16. The article instead considers the numerous representations and misrepresentations of that life in Progressive-era publications in the United States, and the larger cultural and political contexts within which they took place.

New to our understanding of Hensel’s reception is that her story was assisted in its rise to cultural prominence by the well-known American writer, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who first described her life in an article for the suffrage paper The Woman’s Journal in 1882. This essay explores why a literary figure like Higginson came to write about Hensel’s biography and how his numerous references to the composer in support of suffragists’ political outlook became deeply influential. Higginson’s ideas can be traced through writings associated with the suffrage movement in the four decades before 1920. Thus, first-wave feminism shaped an American attitude toward Hensel’s biography that pre-dates the similar interpretations by feminist scholars of the late twentieth century. ^[4] Many of Higginson’s ideas about women’s status reappeared in late twentieth-century musicology, such as in Marcia J. Citron, “Gender, Professionalism and the Musical Canon,” Journal of Musicology 8 (1990): 102–17. See Marian Wilson Kimber, “The Suppression of Fanny Mendelssohn: Rethinking Feminist Biography,” 19th-Century Music 26 (Fall 2002): 113–29.

Musical and Literary Contexts for the Emergence of Fanny Hensel

Before the 1880s, Fanny Hensel’s reputation was primarily linked to Felix Mendelssohn’s biography through the memoirs and volumes of correspondence published after his death. Their close “artistic relations, which made her to him a second self,” as described in one obituary, were frequently recounted. ^[5] “Death of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy,” Boston Daily Atlas, December 25, 1847, translated from Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung. That Hensel’s death deeply disturbed her brother and preceded his by only six months allowed writers to excessively romanticize their connection. The siblings were even depicted in fictionalized accounts, such as Elise Polko’s allegorical essay “Sunken Stars,” published in the New York Musical World, and Elizabeth Sarah Sheppard’s novel Charles Auchester, both from 1853. ^[6] Elise Polko, “Versunkene Sterne,” in Musikalische Mährchen, Phantasien und Skizzen (Leipzig: Barth, 1852), 206–11, trans. Henry Mason as “Sunken Stars,” in New York Musical World 6, no. 10 (July 9, 1853): 150; Elizabeth Sara Sheppard, Charles Auchester: a Memorial (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1853).

Yet specific information about Hensel as a composer in her own right was initially rare in the contemporary press. Her published works—songs, piano works, part-songs, and a Piano Trio—only eleven opus numbers in all, were reviewed when they first appeared; between 1846 and 1848, German-language music journals treated them with both praise and gender-based condescension. ^[7] For example, Wiener allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 17 (May 8, 1847): 223 and Philokales, Wiener allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 17 (December 18, 1847): 606. In articles that chided women amateurs in the 1860s, British critic Henry Chorley called Hensel’s compositions “correct” but “weak and imitative” as well as “tame and void and limp.” ^[8] “Music and Dramatic Gossip,” The Athenaeum 2113 (April 25, 1868): 599; “Music and the Drama,” The Athenaeum 1939 (December 24, 1864): 867. Hensel’s music, particularly her Piano Trio, was occasionally heard in posthumous performances in the nineteenth century. However, there was no public recognition of the large body of unpublished compositions she had produced that remained in private hands. Thus, her small published output initially generated no particular claims for her as a composer.

The influential memoir by Hensel’s son Sebastian, Die Familie Mendelssohn, published in 1879 and translated into English as The Mendelssohn Family in 1881, drew new attention to Fanny Hensel and her status as a composer. Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s subsequent publications mentioning Hensel were part of the substantial writings about her in the American press that resulted from the book, the most influential publication in her posthumous reputation. Sebastian took an apologist approach to his mother’s unusual musical gifts, providing frequent assurances that she had no desire to step outside the feminine sphere. This image was supported by Abraham Mendelssohn’s letter to his young daughter emphasizing her conventional domestic future, as well as by Felix’s later negative response to his mother Lea’s request that he encourage his sister to publish her music.

However, rather than creating the intended portrait of a daughter of “a good German bourgeois family” who dutifully conformed to socially correct gender norms, ^[9] Sebastian Hensel, Die Familie Mendelssohn, 15th ed. (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1911), ix. Sebastian’s construction had the opposite effect. The tale of Hensel as a failed composer, sometimes with Felix and/or Abraham cast as repressive villains, became the primary narrative regarding her. With Higginson’s help, the story came to be repeated in numerous English-language magazines and newspapers. Hensel’s eventual decision to publish her music in 1846 almost entirely disappeared behind the drama of this tale. Instead, Mendelssohn family members became scapegoats for larger societal restrictions shaped by not only gender, but also the family’s upper-class status and position as converted Jews. ^[10] See Nancy B. Reich, “The Power of Class: Fanny Hensel and the Mendelssohn Family,” in Women’s Voices Across Musical Worlds, ed. Jane A. Bernstein (Boston: Northeastern University, 2004), 18–35.

Many factors made Fanny Hensel and the Mendelssohn family appealing to American readers in the late nineteenth century. Felix Mendelssohn was a popular figure in the United States, where his music was widely performed. His character and, by extension that of his family, were viewed as conforming to moral ideals. ^[11] Joseph A. Mussulman, “Mendelssohnism in America,” Musical Quarterly 53, no. 3 (July 1967): 335–46, and Steven Baur, “Music, Morals, and Social Management: Mendelssohn in Post-Civil War America,” American Music 19, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 88–91. In his review of Sebastian Hensel’s book, Edward Dowden praised the family, writing, “Goodness in a group of persons, and in an eminent degree, is rare; goodness with genius, one and indivisible, is still rarer.” ^[12] Edward Dowden, Review of Sebastian Hensel’s The Mendelssohn Family (1729–1827 [sic]) from Letters and Journals, The Academy 21, no. 507 (January 21, 1882): 37. More broadly, The Mendelssohn Family appeared during the period of the development of major American classical music institutions such as orchestras, opera houses, concert halls, and conservatories.

The era also saw the increasing dominance of a European canon of Romantic art music, of which the music of Felix Mendelssohn was a major part. Heavy German immigration to the United States—peaking in the 1880s, such that two and a half million Germans lived in the country by the following decade—assisted in the increasing dominance of German music there. Women were well represented in the American musical landscape, entering the music profession as performers and teachers. ^[13] Judith Tick, “Passed Away is the Piano Girl: Changes in American Musical Life, 1870–1900,” in Women Making Music: the Western Art Tradition, 1150–1950, ed. Jane M. Bowers and Judith Tick (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 326–27. Amateur women musicians established clubs that both performed music and recruited noted touring artists to various metropolitan areas. ^[14] Michael Broyles, “Art Music From 1860 to 1920,” in The Cambridge History of American Music, ed. David Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 227–32. The canon-adjacent Fanny Mendelssohn, possessing a familiar name, would seemingly be an appealing figure for musically-inclined American women, somewhat before composers such as Amy Beach and Cécile Chaminade developed leading reputations in the country, beginning in the 1890s.

Yet the prominence of Hensel’s portrayal as a repressed genius had as much to do with the ways in which she came to serve as a symbol within the era’s suffrage-related discourse about women’s abilities and status as with musical developments in the United States. Contemporary writers’ use of historical women to support particular political agendas was not limited to Hensel’s biography. The nineteenth century saw the publication of collective biographies of women in both America and England; long before he wrote about Hensel, Higginson was a contributor to one such volume, Eminent Women of the Age (1868). ^[15] James Parton, et al., Eminent Women of the Age; Being Narratives of the Lives and Deeds of the Most Prominent Women of the Present Generation (Hartford, CT: Simon Betts, 1869). The volume included performers Camilla Urso, Jenny Lind, and Clara Louise Kellogg, but no composers. Biographical essays, which sometimes presented historical women as role models to emulate, were often imbued with the tensions between feminine public accomplishment and the conventional notion that womanly ideals required devotion to the domestic sphere. ^[16] Alison Booth, “The Lessons of the Medusa: Anna Jameson and Collective Biographies of Women,” Victorian Studies 42, no. 2 (Winter 1999–Winter 2000): 262. For this reason, considering women’s biographies collectively was particularly attractive to feminist writers, who drew on famous women resisting or transcending gender restrictions in full-length books as well as in smaller publications. Essayists endeavored to increase women’s social and cultural status through documenting their collective contributions to history. Highly accomplished figures constituted evidence that women were not inherently hampered in their intellectual abilities. Writings in the United States often drew primarily on famous European women, similar to those presented in British suffrage publications, whether or not such figures would have supported their political positions. ^[17] For example, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Some Eminent Women of Our Time (London: MacMillan, 1889).

Thus, the flurry of writings about Hensel in the suffrage literature that resulted from Higginson’s critical reaction to her life story emerged within an ongoing discourse about the abilities and contributions of women. When it came to the arts, suffragists who took up historical women in support of their cause most often relied on renowned literary figures like Jane Austen. ^[18] See Devoney Looser, The Making of Jane Austen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 164–77. Although women musicians were discussed in music-related publications, they rarely appeared in collective biographies, with the possible exception of Jenny Lind. When questions about women’s ability to compose arose at the turn of the century, there were few examples other than Fanny Mendelssohn in previous writings of this type on which to draw. ^[19] See Tick, “Passed Away is the Piano Girl,” 333–41. Higginson only penned one article specifically devoted to Hensel, yet she appeared in his essays and other writers’ subsequent publications amidst numerous other famous women, characteristically presented as examples of both historical women’s achievements and the restrictions they faced.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Arts and Letters, and Women’s Rights

Figure 1. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, photographed by William Notman, ca. 1880. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Francis A. DiMauro.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911) may initially seem to have been an unlikely champion for Fanny Mendelssohn (see Figure 1). He is best known for his roles as an abolitionist and supporter of John Brown, a political activist, and a leading literary critic, as well as one of the first editors of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Higginson was not personally involved in making music, and he is not considered to have been a member of the group of music critics working in Boston, where he spent much of his life. However, his understanding of music was characteristic of American intellectuals, who had been interested in European art music since the first half of the nineteenth century. Michael Broyles has identified one important origin of an adherence to German Romanticism as a “Harvard-Unitarian axis”; Higginson was educated at Harvard University and served as a Unitarian pastor after studying theology at Harvard’s Divinity School. ^[20] Michael Broyles, Music of the Highest Class: Elitism and Populism in Antebellum Boston (New Haven: Yale University Press 1992), 218.

Higginson’s letters and diaries show him to have attended concerts and operas, and to have been familiar with leading women musicians of the day, such as Jenny Lind and Camilla Urso. ^[21] Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846–1906, ed. Mary Thacher Higginson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), 38, 243, 249. He was personally acquainted with several figures far more knowledgeable about music than he appears to have been, including the music critic John Sullivan Dwight and the feminist writer Margaret Fuller, whose writings for the Dial and the New York Tribune often centered on music. ^[22] Ora Frishberg Saloman, “Margaret Fuller on Musical Life in Boston and New York, 1841–1846,” American Music 6, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 432. Like Higginson, Fuller recognized women as potential composers. As early as the 1840s, she admitted that she was “troubled … to think that there was no great musical composer among women,” an issue which was to be far more prominently discussed a half a century later. ^[23] Quoted in Elizabeth Peabody’s transcription in Nancy Craig Simmons, “Margaret Fuller’s Boston Conversations: The 1839–1840 Series,” Studies in the American Renaissance (1994): 215.

In contrast to Dwight and Fuller, Higginson’s own writings rarely treat the subject of music; perhaps his belief that Fuller wrote poorly about music discouraged him from doing likewise. ^[24] Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Who was Margaret Fuller?” in The Magnificent Activist: the Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911), ed. Howard N. Meyer (New York: Da Capo Press, 2000), 297. Although Higginson produced an important early description of African American spirituals based on his experience serving as the colonel of the Union army’s first regiment of formerly enslaved men, his 1867 article published in the Atlantic contains no terminology beyond that of verse-chorus structures that would indicate he was musically trained. ^[25] T.W. Higginson, “Negro Spirituals,” Atlantic Monthly 19 (1867): 685–94. His 1871 article, “The Power of Simple Music,” described a singer using her vocal skills in a familiar song rather than an opera aria; the anecdote merely served as an analogy to defend education for women destined for the domestic sphere. ^[26] T.W. Higginson, “The Power of Simple Music,” Folio: A Journal of Music, Art & Literature 4, no. 1 (January 1, 1871): 5. The selection of Higginson to introduce Antonín Dvořák before the 1892 concert celebrating the Czech composer’s arrival in America seems to have been for his by then venerable position as a voice for American culture as a whole. The surviving excerpt of the twenty-minute speech, called “tenuous in thought” and “platitudinous in style” by one critic, demonstrates no specific musical knowledge. ^[27] [W. J. Henderson], “Dr. Dvořák Introduced,” New York Times, October 22, 1892.

Higginson was certainly aware of Felix Mendelssohn before penning his article about his lesser-known sister. In 1867, while living in Newport, Rhode Island, he hosted the Mendelssohn Quintette club at a “musical party” for friends, an event which included music by Mendelssohn and other German composers. ^[28] Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 245–47. Higginson read Sheppard’s novel Charles Auchester which features a character based on Mendelssohn; he may or may not have realized that the book’s aspiring composer who dies young, Maria Cerinthea, was based on Hensel. ^[29] Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1898), 18. It is possible that Higginson first encountered Hensel through a book he owned, Fanny Raymond Ritter’s Woman as Musician. Ritter depicted Hensel as a composer, as well as her brother’s helpmate. ^[30] Fanny Raymond Ritter, Woman as Musician: an Art-Historical Study (London: W. Reeves, 1877), 9, 13. Woman as Musician originated in the suffrage literature, appearing as an article in the Woman’s Journal in 1876 and in other publications, as well. Petra Meyer Frazier, ‘“Woman as a Musician:’ American Feminism in 1876,” The Sonneck Society for American Music Bulletin 24 (1991): 3. Higginson had planned to write an intellectual history of women, a task he never completed, and he later donated the large library of volumes about women he had collected, including Ritter’s book, to the Boston Public Library. ^[31] Catalogue of the Galatea Collection of Books Relating to the History of Woman in the Public Library of the City of Boston (Boston: Boston Public Library Trustees, 1898), 21.

Higginson’s writings about Fanny Hensel stemmed from his interest in women’s rights and active involvement in suffrage organizations, which dated from as early as the 1850s. His 1853 pamphlet Woman and Her Wishes: An Essay, addressed to the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, first brought his political positions into public relief; he described how women desired control over their own person and properties and to have access to education and professional opportunities. ^[32] Anna Mary Wells, Dear Preceptor: The Life and Times of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), 84. Higginson was also a longtime friend of suffragist Lucy Stone Blackwell and had performed her wedding ceremony. For fourteen years, from 1870 to 1884, he wrote a regular column for Blackwell’s Woman’s Journal, the leading suffrage newspaper and the organ of the American Woman’s Suffrage Association that she had helped to found. After a falling out with Blackwell, Higginson authored a “Women and Men” column in Harper’s Bazaar that Blackwell sometimes reprinted. The conditions for women and the societal changes required for them to achieve equal status with men were ongoing themes of Higginson’s writings. He not only advocated equal suffrage, but also reforms to marriage and property laws. Like Blackwell and the Woman’s Journal, Higginson emphasized the importance of women’s domestic contributions and of motherhood. However, he was a fierce advocate for women’s education and a defender of their intellectual capacities, for example, finding that women were no less womanly for studying Greek. ^[33] Katharine Marie Rodier, “‘A Career of Letters’: Emily Dickinson, T. W. Higginson, and Literary Women” (PhD diss, University of Connecticut, 1995), 110.

Although Higginson rarely wrote about women musicians, for much of his life he was personally surrounded by, and was sometimes a mentor to, women with literary talents. He served as the biographer for multiple writers, publishing chapters about Fuller and Lydia Maria Child in Eminent Women of the Age (1868) and about Child and Helen Hunt Jackson in Contemporaries (1900). Higginson’s 1884 biography of Fuller, a major intellectual influence for him and with whom he shared feminist ideals, is considered an especially sympathetic treatment of a controversial figure. ^[34] James Tuttleton, Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Boston: Twayne, 1978), 112–13. It was in his capacity as a mentor for younger writers that Higginson received a letter from Emily Dickinson in 1862, leading to a decades-long correspondence and friendship; his eventual role as editor and “corrector” of Dickinson’s poetry after her death has been widely discussed by scholars. ^[35] The tensions between Higginson and his co-editor in the publication of Dickinson’s poems, Mabel Loomis Todd, are described in Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: the Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 271–99. Biographers’ positions on Higginson and Dickinson are summarized in Meyer’s Introduction to The Magnificent Activist: the Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911), 27–30, and Tilden G. Edelstein, “Emily Dickinson and her Mentor in Feminist Perspective,” in Nineteenth-Century Women Writers of the English-Speaking World, ed. Rhoda B. Nathan (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 37–43.

It would be tempting to see Higginson’s reactions to Emily Dickinson and to the historical Fanny Hensel as similar. Dickinson, like Hensel, published very little during her lifetime, and like Hensel’s music, her poems were largely unknown until after her death. ^[36] Raymond A. Mazurek, “‘I Have no Monarch in My Life’: Feminism, Poetry, and Politics in Dickinson and Higginson,” in Patrons and Protégées: Gender, Friendship, and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Shirley Marchalonis (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 122–23. However, Higginson did not fully appreciate Dickinson’s work and discouraged her from publishing, although he eventually came to credit her with originality and genius. ^[37] Harrison Dietzman, “‘[A] wholly new and original poetic genius’: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily Dickinson, and Literary Immortality,” The Emily Dickinson Journal 28, no. 1 (2019): 59–60. Though the comparison fails, it was nonetheless only a short step from Higginson’s recognition of women’s literary efforts to his concern about their potential achievements in other fields, including music. ^[38] Hensel’s reception resembled that of Jane Austen more than Dickinson, as family members depicted both as conforming to gender expectations in important early publications, portrayals that were radically transformed by later critics. Elizabeth Shand, “The Critical Insurgency of Austen’s Suffrage Afterlife: ‘I hope I shall not be accused of pride and prejudice’,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 41, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 97. His 1889 article, “The Question of Music,” specifically defended young women’s musical aspirations and their careers as teachers, singers, and church organists. ^[39] T.W.H., “The Question of Music,” Harper’s Bazaar 22, no. 6 (February 9, 1889): 94.

“A Tributary Rivulet”: Gage’s Review and Higginson’s Article

In 1882, Higginson read the review of The Mendelssohn Family by William Leonard Gage that appeared in Harper’s and subsequently published an article, “Fanny Mendelssohn” in The Woman’s Journal. There is no available evidence that Higginson read the book itself, and his later writings appear to have been reworkings of information gleaned from the review. ^[40] W. L. Gage, “The Mendelssohn Family with Eight Portraits,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 64 (1882): 580–82. Gage’s essay was less a critique than a lengthy summary, illustrated with reproductions of drawings of members of the Mendelssohn family by Fanny’s husband, Wilhelm Hensel. Gage devoted several pages to Fanny, whose name he acknowledged was already familiar to readers. Although the author occasionally lapsed into stereotypically gendered treatment of Hensel, he celebrated her “bright, inspiring, and enthusiastic character.” He reproduced Sebastian Hensel’s description of his mother’s personality and lamented the early, unexpected death of “this glorious creature.” Gage specifically noted, by their numbers, which songs by Fanny appeared in Felix’s opp. 8 and 9. However, he made two comments that shaped Higginson’s perceptions and much subsequent commentary. First, he incorrectly called the two collections of songs, Songs without Words, misidentifying them as Mendelssohn’s character pieces. He then hypothesized that “Doubtless there are others not yet identified as Fanny’s.” ^[41] Angela Mace notes that the notion that Fanny composed some of Felix’s works dates from her lifetime, in “‘Der Jüngling und das Mädchen’: Fanny Hensel, Felix Mendelssohn and the Zwölf Lieder, op. 9,” in Women and the Nineteenth Century Lied, ed. Aisling Kenny and Susan Wollenberg (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015), 65–66. Those two assertions came to be widely repeated.

Like Sebastian Hensel, Gage emphasized the patriarchal influence of Hensel’s family on her as a composer. He acknowledged Felix’s and his father’s opposition to Fanny publishing, and his approach to the episode served to maintain Fanny’s respectability and to lessen her agency. Gage stressed that she “yielded” to the opinions of her father and brother. He also indicated that in desiring an “honorable” fame, Hensel “yielded” to publisher’s entreaties, rather than seeking them out. Felix’s letter congratulating Fanny on issuing her music was reproduced in its entirety. Gage attributed the episode in which Felix admitted to Queen Victoria that his sister had composed “Italien,” which the Queen sang for him, to Fanny’s genius and Felix’s honesty.

Higginson reworked Gage’s version of Hensel’s life story in his Woman’s Journal article, providing a new tone of outrage. He recalled the early signs of her musical abilities and the influence of her mother’s intellect, writing, “One would say that a daughter reared by such a mother could hardly help having her musical powers fully brought forward, and at first it seemed likely to be so.” He claimed that Hensel initially had the same talent and training as her brother, adding,

Here the resemblance stopped. The moment the instinct for composition broke out in each, the difference began. That desire was developed in the brother by every motive that could act on an ardent and ambitious nature. In the sister it was from the beginning checked by the so-called proprieties of her position. If she composed at all, it must be anonymously; her work must be merged in her brother’s; she must be a tributary rivulet, not a stream. ^[42] T. W. H., “Fanny Mendelssohn,” The Woman’s Journal, March 4, 1882.

Higginson reinterpreted the events recounted in Gage’s article, strengthening the power of Hensel’s father and brother in the suppression of her music. Gage’s statement that Felix “admitted all the possibilities of his sister’s mind, but he did not favor her having a career as an independent composer,” seems to have suggested to Higginson that Felix wanted Fanny to continue to publish her works under his name. In Higginson’s reading, Hensel yielding to publisher’s offers was transformed into the family giving her their “consent,” an interpretation that strengthened their power over her and that was not an aspect of the original review. Higginson likewise highlighted patriarchal power in the story of Felix generously admitting that his sister was the composer of the song Queen Victoria selected when he quipped, “‘generosity,’ such things are called when it is a man who does them.”

Higginson’s criticism of the musical loss supposedly created through Hensel’s “repression” was generally in line with his writings advocating education, independence, and the possibility of professional life for women. However, Higginson’s goal in retelling Hensel’s story was also to critique the ways women were forced to downplay or even abandon their achievements, thereby writing themselves out of history. “Never was there a more striking instance of the kind of self-concealing, self-denying career that has in all ages been prescribed for women,” he wrote about Hensel. It was women’s goal to stay out of encyclopedias, Higginson continued, in order that men may not find them there and thus retain their sense of superiority. He admitted that he had futilely looked through multiple reference books searching for “Fanny Mendelssohn, who might, but for this life-long repression, have ranked beside her brother as a composer.” ^[43] Fanny had already appeared in European reference works but had not yet appeared in the English-language music encyclopedias of John Denison Champlin (1889), Sir George Grove (1890), or Theodore Baker (1900).

As suffrage literature, Higginson’s treatment of Hensel met two of the Woman’s Journal’s goals. First, Hensel’s compositional abilities allowed her to serve as a role model, one of the women capable of achieving positions in traditionally male fields that it regularly presented; ^[44] Susan Schultz Huxman, “The Woman’s Journal, 1870–1890: the Torchbearer for Suffrage,” in A Voice of Their Own: the Woman’s Suffrage Press, 1940–1910, ed. Martha M. Solomon (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991), 104. this sort of feminist presentation of emulatable women’s lives dated as far back as Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). ^[45] Marie O. Urbanski, “Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century: The Feminist Manifesto,” in Nineteenth-Century Women Writers of the English-Speaking World, 203. Both the Woman’s Journal and the Woman’s Column, the paper edited by Lucy Stone Blackwell’s daughter Alice that enjoyed the largest circulation among suffrage periodicals, attempted to construct images of women that showed them to be worthy of civic participation. ^[46] Marsha L. Vanderfort, “The Woman’s Column, 1888–1904: Extending the Suffrage Community,” in A Voice of Their Own, 130, 145–47. The Woman’s Column provided suffrage articles for subscribing newspapers around the country. Both publications represented the less radical faction of the American suffrage movement, working to increase women’s rights without threatening traditional institutions or associating the movement with birth control, divorce, or sexual freedom. In this way, they would not alienate more mainstream readers and could thus attract the broadest number of supporters for their goal. Nonetheless, the Blackwells’ publications endeavored to show women as successful both within and outside the home, celebrating their achievements in higher education and various professions. Women’s increasing abilities, like Hensel’s in composition, demonstrated that they were competent to become politically involved.

More importantly, Hensel’s story met the goals of suffrage publications by vividly underscoring the problematic status of women, which had to be continually brought to light so that it might be overcome. More reluctant readers needed to be dissatisfied in order to work to fight the “social tyranny” and the restrictions that had “hammered, hindered, limited and denied” women an equal position with men. Higginson half joked, “What will become of us if we should … discover ourselves to be without a grievance?” ^[47] “What is the Aim of the Women’s Movement?” The Woman’s Journal, April 9, 1870, and T. W. Higginson, “The New Year,” The Woman’s Journal, January 3, 1880, quoted in Huxman, “The Woman’s Journal, 1870–1890,” 106. The expectation that women like Hensel “smother their own work with silence” and “give their laurels to swell those of their brothers” could help the Journal generate the outrage that drew people to the suffrage cause. ^[48] T. W. H., “Fanny Mendelssohn.”

Fanny Hensel in Higginson’s Later Essays

After Higginson published his essay about Hensel, she continued to make regular appearances in his magazine articles, which were then reprinted in his book collections into the 1890s (see Appendix). Although most of Higginson’s subsequent articles that included the composer appeared in Harper’s rather than the Woman’s Journal, the suffragist roots of this thinking remained apparent. His writings critiqued Hensel’s lack of recognition and identified her as representative of whatever points a particular essay made about women’s abilities or their potential for lasting contributions in literature and the arts. The author typically presented Hensel as only one case among several, and she served as the primary example for the field of music. She was often mentioned amidst women writers, towards whom Higginson, as a writer himself, was naturally inclined, or sometimes alongside the scientist, Mary Somerville, or the painter, Rosa Bonheur.

Higginson most often focused on the injustice of Hensel publishing her works under her brother’s name. For example, the composer appeared at the close of his 1885 essay about women authors taking male pseudonyms because publishing under their own name prevented their works from being judged fairly without sexist criticism. While Higginson’s examples were almost entirely literary, Hensel was presented as the evidence that women continued to be “handicapped” in all professions, including music. ^[49] T. W. H., “Women and Men: Women Authors Masquerading as Men,” Harper’s Bazaar 18, no. 16 (April 18, 1885): 250. Higginson’s 1889 commentary in The Nation cited Hensel’s music appearing under another moniker in pointing out that women were latecomers to creating both poetry and music; despite an abundance of poetic and “musical feeling,” woman had “been little known as a composer.”

Higginson’s writings treating Hensel underscored the social and cultural restrictions that prevented her and other women writers and artists from realizing success. Higginson acknowledged that overall conditions had recently become more conducive to women’s artistic production. However, he described the difficulties women continued to face as barren ground:

The most gifted woman, struggling for intellectual progress in the most favorable surroundings, is still like a single plant or little group of plants trying to sustain itself where the soil as a whole is not yet fitted for its reception, and it is only in some favored nook that it manages to exist at all.

Higginson concluded that given the lack of a fertile environment, it was remarkable that nineteenth-century women had achieved the accomplishments that they had. ^[50] T.W. H., “Repression at Long Range,” Woman’s Journal 20, no. 25 (June 22, 1889): 200. In 1893 in “The Advancing Line,” the former Colonel made similar points about the systemic restrictions that had prevented women’s achievements stressing that, like fighting soldiers, no individual woman could be successful unless the entire “line” of women advanced. ^[51] “Women and Men: The Advancing Line,” Harper’s Bazaar 26, no. 32 (August 12, 1893): 650. He again recalled Hensel’s supposed lack of familial support, noting that it was not possible to determine what she “might or might not have accomplished in music” had she received more encouragement.

Hensel was Higginson’s primary example of a woman composer in his response to George P. Upton’s 1886 book Woman in Music. Upton firmly asserted that men were the only humans fully endowed with creative genius. His book was organized around the lives of canonic male composers, only secondarily considering the women who supported them. Upton acknowledged that Hensel composed, but concentrated heavily on her musical interchanges with her brother and her early death. ^[52] George P. Upton, Woman in Music (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1886), 140–43. Higginson, in contrast, recognized that most women had not received sufficient training in harmony or counterpoint to be able to compose. Women with musical genius remained in a “subordinate and suppressed position,” as did Fanny, whose compositions were designed to “swell” Felix’s “fame,” and whose family believed her “unsexed” when she began to publish. ^[53] “Women and Men: The Missing Musical Woman,” Harper’s Bazaar 19, no. 29 (July 17, 1886): 462. Higginson further emphasized that Germany, which he viewed as the region that most often produced composers, had firmer restrictions on women entering the public sphere.

Fanny Hensel in Progressive-Era Discourse

Writing about Hensel continued for the next few decades, peaking in the 1890s but lasting past the first decade of the new century. Higginson’s essays had a significant influence on subsequent publications, on those by authors associated with the suffrage movement, as well as on less political biographical writings. The most direct connection can be found in three essays that included Hensel penned by Alice Stone Blackwell. ^[54] Blackwell is one of the few suffragists writing about Hensel with documented musical training. She described practicing (presumably the piano) and copying music in Growing up in Boston’s Gilded Age: the Journal of Alice Stone Blackwell, 1872–1874, ed. Marlene Deahl Merrill (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 104. Blackwell took over the editorship of the Journal from her mother Lucy, and she drew on Higginson’s writings in her own publications, sometimes quoting them. Blackwell recalled Higginson’s response to Upton in an essay for the Woman’s Column in noting women’s lack of training and German gender restrictions, as well as the danger of Hensel appearing “unwomanly.” ^[55] Alice Stone Blackwell, “Women in Literature and Art,” The Woman’s Journal, August 29, 1891; also published in The Woman’s Column 4, no. 35 (August 1891): 2. In an 1899 article defending women against being “inferior and defective,” Blackwell, like Higginson, envisioned a future in which women would equal men in musical composition after they were given “equal encouragement” to engage in it. ^[56] Alice Stone Blackwell, “John J. Ingalls on Women,” The Woman’s Column 12, no. 23 (November 18, 1899): 2–3. Along with the composers Amy Beach, George Chadwick, and others, Blackwell was called on to respond to Antonín Dvořák’s 1892 assertion that women lacked the creative ability to help the cause of American music. ^[57] “Women Can’t Help,” Boston Post, November 30, 1892; “American Music: Dvořák Thinks Little Has Been Done Here,” Boston Daily Traveler, December 10, 1892, in Robert Winter and Peter Bogdanoff, Direct Testimony, From the New World: A Composer’s American Sojourn, Internet Archive Wayback Machine, http://homepage.mac.com/rswinter/DirectTestimony/home.html. Here she even suggested that women’s recent advances might indicate they were surpassing men, though she acknowledged it was more likely that they, like Hensel, had always possessed some “native capacity” but were held back by educational deficiencies. ^[58] Alice Stone Blackwell, “Women in Literature and Art,” The Woman’s Column 4, no. 35 (August 1891): 2.

Suffragist commentators who lacked Blackwell’s personal connection to Higginson likewise cited his ideas. In her book The New Womanhood, the self-declared feminist Winnifred Harper Cooley repeated his assertion that Hensel had been omitted from encyclopedias. ^[59] Winnifred Harper Cooley, The New Womanhood (New York: Broadway, 1904), 19. Cooley’s mother, Ida Husted Harper, wrote a biography of Susan B. Anthony and contributed to The History of Woman Suffrage. As late as 1916, when Leopold Stokowski generated controversy after mentioning that women could be orchestral musicians and conductors, pianist and suffragist Mary Hallock Greenewalt again drew on the idea that Felix had prevented Fanny from publishing, claiming that “he was so jealous of her that he was extremely energetic in keeping her musical training at a standstill.” Greenewalt found Mendelssohn to be representative of modern men restricting women from having careers. ^[60] “Stokowski Woman Orchestra Idea has Warm Supporters,” Evening Ledger [Philadelphia], March 7, 1916.

The overtly feminist nature of women’s commentary was in contrast to the treatment of Hensel by the well-known journalist James Parton, considered the leading creator of the genre of biography in the United States. ^[61] See Scott. E. Casper, Constructing American Lives: Biography & Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 220–56. A personal acquaintance of Higginson, Parton wrote articles for The Youth’s Companion from 1880 to 1891. The magazine published an article called “Mendelssohn’s Sister,” which reprinted part of Higginson’s original essay about Hensel a month after it appeared. ^[62] Milton Embick Flower, James Parton, the Father of Modern Biography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1951), 193; “Mendelssohn’s Sister,” The Youth’s Companion 55, no. 16 (April 20, 1882): 155. Four years later, Parton featured Hensel in Daughters of Genius, a book about famous women written with the help of his niece Ethel. The chapter about Hensel began similarly to the period’s feminist writings, proposing her as a case study for why women had not become successful composers and acknowledging that patriarchal traditions had prevented her from pursuing music further. Nonetheless, Parton presented Hensel as largely happy in her domestic life. In contrast to Higginson, he found that abiding by her father’s and brother’s wishes was admirable and “her cheerful obedience was wise.” ^[63] James Parton, Daughters of Genius: A Series of Sketches of Authors, Artists, Reformers, and Heroines, Queens, Princesses, and Women of Society, Women Eccentric and Peculiar (Philadelphia: Hubbard Brothers, 1886), 124. Despite these differences, it seems that Hensel’s very appearance in Parton’s biographical anthology probably stemmed from his familiarity with Higginson’s writings.

Higginson’s publications may have also influenced the chapter on Hensel, “A Genius Wasted,” in the 1892 collective biography Six Interesting Women by British suffragette Florence Fenwick Miller. Fenwick Miller, later editor of the feminist journal Woman’s Signal, had known Susan B. Anthony since 1883 and maintained communication with the American suffrage community. She gave a presentation at the World’s Congress of Representative Women in Chicago in 1893; that her appearance was widely reported in the American press may have furthered the circulation of her book in the United States. ^[64] See Rosemary T. VanArsdel, Florence Fenwick Miller: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, and Educator (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 149–69. Like Higginson, Fenwick Miller used the story of Hensel’s talents to bemoan “how many gifted souls enclosed in female bodies have suffered in like manner.” ^[65] Florence Fenwick Miller, In Ladies’ Company: Six Interesting Women (London: Ward and Downey, 1892), 152. She assumed that Hensel was actively prevented from developing her compositional talents, writing,

But that a girl should be discouraged, and neglected, and postponed to her brother’s interests, brought up with her powers undeveloped, and sent to the grave with them atrophied by disuse, having all her life long had her original gifts distorted to serve the purposes of another—oh that is an intolerable injustice and cruelty! ^[66] Miller, 138.

The reviewer of Fenwick Miller’s book in The Spectator agreed that Hensel’s case was particularly unfortunate and quoted the author’s criticism of women’s subjugation to domestic life: “‘Poor, poor Fanny!’ exclaims Mrs. Miller, a little rhapsodically, ‘ . . . . .and poor world which as wasted so much of its too rare genius in wiping dust off furniture and rubbing soap through sieves.’” ^[67] The Spectator 69, no. 3341 (July 9, 1892): 43. In contrast, The Saturday Review instead found Fenwick Miller’s book “somewhat overcharged with the current sentiment concerning the emancipated woman,” and skeptical both of the notion that true genius could ever be restrained and of Hensel’s compositional abilities. “Does Mrs. Miller really believe,” the reviewer asked incredulously, “that Fanny Mendelssohn could have written St. Paul or the Scotch Symphony?” ^[68] “New Books and Reprints,” Saturday Review 74, no. 1914 (July 2, 1892): 30. Similar use of Hensel to call attention to women’s failures as composers continued through the end of the century. 

A Spreading Myth: Hensel as the Composer of Songs without Words

Not only did Higginson emphasize that Fanny’s works had been published as Felix’s, with the exception of his first article in 1882, his writings did not recognize the existence of the compositions she issued under her own name late in her life. This worked to further the indignation surrounding her music’s appearance within her brother’s output, as when Cooley bemoaned that Hensel “had her compositions appropriated wholesale.” ^[69] Cooley, The New Woman, 18–19. In her facetious Woman’s Journal article critiquing the idea that women are fools, Helen Clark asserted, “I think Fanny was a fool, in this case, not to take all the credit that belonged to her.” ^[70] Helen Clark, “Hints for a New Leaflet,” The Woman’s Journal, June 27, 1885; reprinted as “Are Women Fools?” in The Sentinel: Milwaukee, July 29, 1885.

Higginson was obviously unaware of the specifics of Felix or Fanny’s outputs, as he parroted Gage’s error that Felix’s opp. 8 and 9 were Songs without Words, not simply songs. ^[71] On stylistic relationships between songs and piano works in Hensel’s output see R. Larry Todd, “Fanny Hensel’s Lieder (ohne Worte) and the Boundaries of Song: the Curious Case of the Lied in D Flat Major, op. 8, no. 3,” in The Songs of Fanny Hensel, ed. Stephen Rodgers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 217–23. The error continued to be widely repeated, often growing with the retelling. Alice Stone Blackwell told the Boston Daily Traveler that Hensel had composed “quite a number” of her brother’s character pieces. ^[72] “American Music: Dvorak Thinks Little Has Been Done Here.” Fanny’s authorship of Felix’s Songs without Words became so commonplace that it was recounted in educational materials for children, such as in The Story of Music and Musicians for Young Readers by Lucy C. Lillie. ^[73] Lucy C. Lillie, The Story of Music and Musicians for Young Readers (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1886), 201. In 1902, it was presented as “historical fact” in a brief newspaper article credited to the Philadelphia Ledger and reprinted in dozens of North American newspapers from Lewiston, Maine, to Petaluma, California, and as far away as Honolulu. ^[74] Lewiston Daily Sun, June 13, 1902; Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 28, 1902; and Evening Bulletin [Honolulu], August 6, 1902. By 1916, Greenewalt could insist that Hensel had written half of her brother’s famous Songs without Words. ^[75] “Stokowski Woman Orchestra Idea has Warm Supporters.”

Although there is no evidence that any of Mendelssohn’s published Songs without Words are by his sister, the spreading myth became the center of a published interchange between Higginson and the novelist Molly Elliot Seawell regarding women’s inherent talents. In 1891, Seawell published an article in The Critic entitled “On the Absence of the Creative Faculty in Women.” She claimed that “no woman has ever done anything in the intellectual world, which has had the germ of immortality” and that women are incapable of genius. ^[76] Molly Elliott Seawell, “On the Absence of the Creative Faculty in Women,” The Critic 16, no. 413 (November 28, 1891): 292. Seawell believed that in the field of music women had received opportunities equal to men, but had never produced a great composer or even a great composition.

Seawell’s controversial diatribe generated a wide range of responses from around the country, including one from Higginson, who wittily remarked that women who assert that other women lack brains perhaps prove their point. Higginson reminded readers that due to illiteracy, women had come to literature and other art forms later than men. In spite of figures such as Sappho, Jane Austen, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, women had been faced with “the tradition that it is the duty of woman to efface herself.” ^[77] T. W. H., “The Lilliputian Theory of Woman,” Harper’s Bazaar 24, no. 52 (December 26, 1891): 1014. Higginson again drew on Hensel’s music published with Mendelssohn’s as one of his examples, closing his essay with the admonition that “On the whole, it is better to wait a few centuries before denying lyric genius to the successors of Sappho and music to the sisters of Fanny Mendelssohn.”

Higginson’s rebuttal was reprinted in The Critic, which noted that it was the best response to Seawell, and was summarized in Harper’s the following year after it was reissued in Higginson’s book Concerning All of Us. When The Critic reviewed Higginson’s book favorably, Seawell responded angrily, sarcastically requesting to be educated about women’s immortal work and demanding to know whether they had produced numerous compositions that might rival Beethoven’s. Seawell found Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words to be inferior compositions, and thus the idea that Hensel had written them worked against Higginson’s arguments:

Col. Higginson seems to have high respect for the ‘Songs Without Words,’ which he thinks were chiefly done by Fanny Mendelssohn, instead of Felix. . . almost every third word he says is on my side of the question. The ‘Songs Without Words’ are of very unequal merit, according to the judgement of the best musicians, and as one great artist calls them, the embodiment of sickly sentimentality. They are so far inferior to Mendelssohn’s own, undisputed work, that it is extremely probable Fanny Mendelssohn did write the greater part of them. ^[78] Molly Elliott Seawell, “The Lilliputian Theory of Woman” [letter to the editor], The Critic 18, no. 543 (July 16, 1892): 36.

In trying to undermine Higginson’s argument, Seawell drew on the association of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words with women and the domestic sphere, which, while potentially strengthening any claim Hensel might have had to their authorship, was increasingly harmful to their overall reputation. Thus, the entire argument on both sides rested on factual errors, with neither participant demonstrating any first-hand knowledge of Hensel’s output.

Similar to Seawell’s comments, publications that aspired to prove women’s inferiority in musical composition sometimes cited Hensel, often not as a restricted talent, but simply as an inferior, unsuccessful composer. Edith Brower’s Atlantic Monthly essay, “Is the Musical Idea Masculine?” relied on Higginson’s supposed inability to find an entry about Hensel in encyclopedias to reinforce the idea that “she is not spoken of therein as a composer;” she added that even if Felix’s best Songs without Words were by Fanny, that did not justify calling her a “great composer.” ^[79] Edith Brower, “Is the Musical Idea Masculine?” The Atlantic Monthly 73 (1894): 332. In asserting that mediocrity in the arts proved women’s inferiority to men, G. G. Buckler mentioned “the much-discussed share” of Hensel’s contributions to her brother’s Lieder ohne Worte as the one exception to the lack of compositions by women musicians. ^[80] G. G. Buckler, “The Lesser Man,” The North American Review 165 (1897): 304. Alexander Sutherland seemed to sympathetically recount the social strictures Hensel had faced, describing how she had been forced to undertake her musical activities as a mere “pastime” before her marriage and, echoing Higginson, how her songs served to “swell the volume of her brother’s fame.” He nonetheless concluded that because men’s brains are physically larger, the “substantial balance” of history remained dominated by the “male intellect.” ^[81] Alexander Sutherland, “Woman’s Brain,” The Nineteenth Century 47, no. 279 (May 1900): 808.

Fanny Hensel as a Symbol for American Women

Assisted by Higginson and other suffragists, Hensel came to serve as a symbol for women and their artistic engagement, even when not surrounded by overt suffrage rhetoric. The unavailability of Hensel’s scores meant that her music did not appear on the numerous concerts of works by women composers organized by American women’s clubs beginning in the 1890s, but knowledge of her was part of club culture. In a 1911 article about women’s music clubs, Greenewalt exclaimed, “Think of the Chaminade Clubs, the St. Cecilia and Fanny Mendelssohn coteries!” ^[82] Mary Hallock [Greenewalt], “Women’s Music Clubs,” The Musician 16, no. 9 (1911): 581. Educational materials for women’s study of music often included Hensel. Caroline Benton’s 1913 book Women’s Club Work and Programs listed her among the famous figures who could be studied to celebrate women’s achievements, and in 1914 the General Federation of Women’s Clubs also included her in a “Women in Music” study guide. ^[83] Catherine French Benton, Woman’s Club Work and Programs (Boston: D. Estes, 1913), 278; General Federation Bulletin 14 (August 1915): 16. Clubwomen across America presented reports about Hensel, such as at a 1904 meeting of the Women’s Club of Estherville, Iowa (population 3200), at Albuquerque’s Fortnightly Club in 1922, and as late as 1933 at the Women’s Club of Portland, Oregon. ^[84] 1903–1904 Program, State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City; Albuquerque Morning Journal, February 18, 1922; Morning Oregonian, October 11, 1933.

Some music clubs were even named after the composer. Founded in 1896, the short-lived Fanny Mendelssohn Society of Scranton, Pennsylvania, was a women’s chorus that grew to approximately fifty members and gave well-attended concerts. ^[85] “First Concert an Artistic Success,” The Scranton Tribune, May 11, 1897. Fanny Mendelssohn clubs for children to build their confidence for musical performances were the brainchild of Katharine Burrowes, who organized such a group in Detroit and proposed club activities in The Etude in 1902. ^[86] Katharine Burrowes, “Methods of Interesting Students in Musical Study,” The Etude 20, no. 3 (March 1902): 94. Clubs from Alabama to Vermont selected Fanny as their namesake to provide young girls with a role model; the Williamsport, Pennsylvania club optimistically reported that “The ‘Fanny Mendelssohns’ are wide awake and will be heard from in the future.” ^[87] Henrietta C. Bastress, The Etude 22, no. 6 (June 1904): 241.

The late nineteenth-century feminist lament for the fate of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and her position as a symbol for musical women would not have emerged without the publication of Sebastian Hensel’s family memoir and, more broadly, America’s aspiration to participate in European musical culture. Yet Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s 1882 article and his continuing references to Hensel amidst the assorted historical women cited in his publications was an important factor in circulating and solidifying her story. The Fanny Mendelssohn whose family restricted her compositional efforts, whose music was primarily published by her brother, and who composed some of his Songs without Words was taken up by numerous writers associated with the American suffrage movement. Unlike the outputs of the literary figures most prevalently cited in suffrage writings, Hensel’s music was not widely known, so her abilities could not be truly evaluated, even if the writers who criticized her circumstances had possessed the musical training to allow them to do so. At the same time, the unavailability of her full compositional legacy boosted the possibility of shaping her life story in ways that supported the political struggle for women’s equality. Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s biography, fragmentary and inaccurate as it was, served the suffragist agenda to highlight the cultural restrictions faced by women throughout history and to validate their intellectual capacity to participate in civic life. 

Notes

^[1] For example, J. T. [John Thomson], “Notes of a Musical Tourist,” The Harmonicon 8, no. 6 (March 3, 1830): 99.

^[2] Hensel had only begun to publish her works a year before her death in 1847; several additional works were issued by her family.

^[3] See R. Larry Todd, Fanny Hensel: the Other Mendelssohn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 47–49, 208–9, and 315–16.

^[4] Many of Higginson’s ideas about women’s status reappeared in late twentieth-century musicology, such as in Marcia J. Citron, “Gender, Professionalism and the Musical Canon,” Journal of Musicology 8 (1990): 102–17. See Marian Wilson Kimber, “The Suppression of Fanny Mendelssohn: Rethinking Feminist Biography,” 19th-Century Music 26 (Fall 2002): 113–29.

^[5] “Death of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy,” Boston Daily Atlas, December 25, 1847, translated from Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung.

^[6] Elise Polko, “Versunkene Sterne,” in Musikalische Mährchen, Phantasien und Skizzen (Leipzig: Barth, 1852), 206–11, trans. Henry Mason as “Sunken Stars,” in New York Musical World 6, no. 10 (July 9, 1853): 150; Elizabeth Sara Sheppard, Charles Auchester: a Memorial (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1853).

^[7] For example, Wiener allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 17 (May 8, 1847): 223 and Philokales, Wiener allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 17 (December 18, 1847): 606.

^[8] “Music and Dramatic Gossip,” The Athenaeum 2113 (April 25, 1868): 599; “Music and the Drama,” The Athenaeum 1939 (December 24, 1864): 867.

^[9] Sebastian Hensel, Die Familie Mendelssohn, 15th ed. (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1911), ix.

^[10] See Nancy B. Reich, “The Power of Class: Fanny Hensel and the Mendelssohn Family,” in Women’s Voices Across Musical Worlds, ed. Jane A. Bernstein (Boston: Northeastern University, 2004), 18–35.

^[11] Joseph A. Mussulman, “Mendelssohnism in America,” Musical Quarterly 53, no. 3 (July 1967): 335–46, and Steven Baur, “Music, Morals, and Social Management: Mendelssohn in Post-Civil War America,” American Music 19, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 88–91.

^[12] Edward Dowden, Review of Sebastian Hensel’s The Mendelssohn Family (1729–1827 [sic]) from Letters and Journals, The Academy 21, no. 507 (January 21, 1882): 37.

^[13] Judith Tick, “Passed Away is the Piano Girl: Changes in American Musical Life, 1870–1900,” in Women Making Music: the Western Art Tradition, 1150–1950, ed. Jane M. Bowers and Judith Tick (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 326–27.

^[14] Michael Broyles, “Art Music From 1860 to 1920,” in The Cambridge History of American Music, ed. David Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 227–32.

^[15] James Parton, et al., Eminent Women of the Age; Being Narratives of the Lives and Deeds of the Most Prominent Women of the Present Generation (Hartford, CT: Simon Betts, 1869). The volume included performers Camilla Urso, Jenny Lind, and Clara Louise Kellogg, but no composers.

^[16] Alison Booth, “The Lessons of the Medusa: Anna Jameson and Collective Biographies of Women,” Victorian Studies 42, no. 2 (Winter 1999–Winter 2000): 262.

^[17] For example, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Some Eminent Women of Our Time (London: MacMillan, 1889).

^[18] See Devoney Looser, The Making of Jane Austen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 164–77.

^[19] See Tick, “Passed Away is the Piano Girl,” 333–41.

^[20] Michael Broyles, Music of the Highest Class: Elitism and Populism in Antebellum Boston (New Haven: Yale University Press 1992), 218.

^[21] Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846–1906, ed. Mary Thacher Higginson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), 38, 243, 249.

^[22] Ora Frishberg Saloman, “Margaret Fuller on Musical Life in Boston and New York, 1841–1846,” American Music 6, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 432.

^[23] Quoted in Elizabeth Peabody’s transcription in Nancy Craig Simmons, “Margaret Fuller’s Boston Conversations: The 1839–1840 Series,” Studies in the American Renaissance (1994): 215.

^[24] Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Who was Margaret Fuller?” in The Magnificent Activist: the Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911), ed. Howard N. Meyer (New York: Da Capo Press, 2000), 297.

^[25] T.W. Higginson, “Negro Spirituals,” Atlantic Monthly 19 (1867): 685–94.

^[26] T.W. Higginson, “The Power of Simple Music,” Folio: A Journal of Music, Art & Literature 4, no. 1 (January 1, 1871): 5.

^[27] [W. J. Henderson], “Dr. Dvořák Introduced,” New York Times, October 22, 1892.

^[28] Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 245–47.

^[29] Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1898), 18.

^[30] Fanny Raymond Ritter, Woman as Musician: an Art-Historical Study (London: W. Reeves, 1877), 9, 13. Woman as Musician originated in the suffrage literature, appearing as an article in the Woman’s Journal in 1876 and in other publications, as well. Petra Meyer Frazier, ‘“Woman as a Musician:’ American Feminism in 1876,” The Sonneck Society for American Music Bulletin 24 (1991): 3.

^[31] Catalogue of the Galatea Collection of Books Relating to the History of Woman in the Public Library of the City of Boston (Boston: Boston Public Library Trustees, 1898), 21.

^[32] Anna Mary Wells, Dear Preceptor: The Life and Times of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), 84.

^[33] Katharine Marie Rodier, “‘A Career of Letters’: Emily Dickinson, T. W. Higginson, and Literary Women” (PhD diss, University of Connecticut, 1995), 110.

^[34] James Tuttleton, Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Boston: Twayne, 1978), 112–13.

^[35] The tensions between Higginson and his co-editor in the publication of Dickinson’s poems, Mabel Loomis Todd, are described in Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: the Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 271–99. Biographers’ positions on Higginson and Dickinson are summarized in Meyer’s Introduction to The Magnificent Activist: the Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911), 27–30, and Tilden G. Edelstein, “Emily Dickinson and her Mentor in Feminist Perspective,” in Nineteenth-Century Women Writers of the English-Speaking World, ed. Rhoda B. Nathan (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 37–43.

^[36] Raymond A. Mazurek, “‘I Have no Monarch in My Life’: Feminism, Poetry, and Politics in Dickinson and Higginson,” in Patrons and Protégées: Gender, Friendship, and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Shirley Marchalonis (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 122–23.

^[37] Harrison Dietzman, “‘[A] wholly new and original poetic genius’: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily Dickinson, and Literary Immortality,” The Emily Dickinson Journal 28, no. 1 (2019): 59–60.

^[38] Hensel’s reception resembled that of Jane Austen more than Dickinson, as family members depicted both as conforming to gender expectations in important early publications, portrayals that were radically transformed by later critics. Elizabeth Shand, “The Critical Insurgency of Austen’s Suffrage Afterlife: ‘I hope I shall not be accused of pride and prejudice’,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 41, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 97.

^[39] T.W.H., “The Question of Music,” Harper’s Bazaar 22, no. 6 (February 9, 1889): 94.

^[40] W. L. Gage, “The Mendelssohn Family with Eight Portraits,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 64 (1882): 580–82.

^[41] Angela Mace notes that the notion that Fanny composed some of Felix’s works dates from her lifetime, in “‘Der Jüngling und das Mädchen’: Fanny Hensel, Felix Mendelssohn and the Zwölf Lieder, op. 9,” in Women and the Nineteenth Century Lied, ed. Aisling Kenny and Susan Wollenberg (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015), 65–66.

^[42] T. W. H., “Fanny Mendelssohn,” The Woman’s Journal, March 4, 1882.

^[43] Fanny had already appeared in European reference works but had not yet appeared in the English-language music encyclopedias of John Denison Champlin (1889), Sir George Grove (1890), or Theodore Baker (1900).

^[44] Susan Schultz Huxman, “The Woman’s Journal, 1870–1890: the Torchbearer for Suffrage,” in A Voice of Their Own: the Woman’s Suffrage Press, 1940–1910, ed. Martha M. Solomon (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991), 104.

^[45] Marie O. Urbanski, “Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century: The Feminist Manifesto,” in Nineteenth-Century Women Writers of the English-Speaking World, 203.

^[46] Marsha L. Vanderfort, “The Woman’s Column, 1888–1904: Extending the Suffrage Community,” in A Voice of Their Own, 130, 145–47. The Woman’s Column provided suffrage articles for subscribing newspapers around the country.

^[47] “What is the Aim of the Women’s Movement?” The Woman’s Journal, April 9, 1870, and T. W. Higginson, “The New Year,” The Woman’s Journal, January 3, 1880, quoted in Huxman, “The Woman’s Journal, 1870–1890,” 106.

^[48] T. W. H., “Fanny Mendelssohn.”

^[49] T. W. H., “Women and Men: Women Authors Masquerading as Men,” Harper’s Bazaar 18, no. 16 (April 18, 1885): 250.

^[50] T.W. H., “Repression at Long Range,” Woman’s Journal 20, no. 25 (June 22, 1889): 200.

^[51] “Women and Men: The Advancing Line,” Harper’s Bazaar 26, no. 32 (August 12, 1893): 650.

^[52] George P. Upton, Woman in Music (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1886), 140–43.

^[53] “Women and Men: The Missing Musical Woman,” Harper’s Bazaar 19, no. 29 (July 17, 1886): 462.

^[54] Blackwell is one of the few suffragists writing about Hensel with documented musical training. She described practicing (presumably the piano) and copying music in Growing up in Boston’s Gilded Age: the Journal of Alice Stone Blackwell, 1872–1874, ed. Marlene Deahl Merrill (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 104.

^[55] Alice Stone Blackwell, “Women in Literature and Art,” The Woman’s Journal, August 29, 1891; also published in The Woman’s Column 4, no. 35 (August 1891): 2.

^[56] Alice Stone Blackwell, “John J. Ingalls on Women,” The Woman’s Column 12, no. 23 (November 18, 1899): 2–3.

^[57] “Women Can’t Help,” Boston Post, November 30, 1892; “American Music: Dvořák Thinks Little Has Been Done Here,” Boston Daily Traveler, December 10, 1892, in Robert Winter and Peter Bogdanoff, Direct Testimony, From the New World: A Composer’s American Sojourn, Internet Archive Wayback Machine, http://homepage.mac.com/rswinter/DirectTestimony/home.html.

^[58] Alice Stone Blackwell, “Women in Literature and Art,” The Woman’s Column 4, no. 35 (August 1891): 2.

^[59] Winnifred Harper Cooley, The New Womanhood (New York: Broadway, 1904), 19. Cooley’s mother, Ida Husted Harper, wrote a biography of Susan B. Anthony and contributed to The History of Woman Suffrage.

^[60] “Stokowski Woman Orchestra Idea has Warm Supporters,” Evening Ledger [Philadelphia], March 7, 1916.

^[61] See Scott. E. Casper, Constructing American Lives: Biography & Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 220–56.

^[62] Milton Embick Flower, James Parton, the Father of Modern Biography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1951), 193; “Mendelssohn’s Sister,” The Youth’s Companion 55, no. 16 (April 20, 1882): 155.

^[63] James Parton, Daughters of Genius: A Series of Sketches of Authors, Artists, Reformers, and Heroines, Queens, Princesses, and Women of Society, Women Eccentric and Peculiar (Philadelphia: Hubbard Brothers, 1886), 124.

^[64] See Rosemary T. VanArsdel, Florence Fenwick Miller: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, and Educator (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 149–69.

^[65] Florence Fenwick Miller, In Ladies’ Company: Six Interesting Women (London: Ward and Downey, 1892), 152.

^[66] Miller, 138.

^[67] The Spectator 69, no. 3341 (July 9, 1892): 43.

^[68] “New Books and Reprints,” Saturday Review 74, no. 1914 (July 2, 1892): 30.

^[69] Cooley, The New Woman, 18–19.

^[70] Helen Clark, “Hints for a New Leaflet,” The Woman’s Journal, June 27, 1885; reprinted as “Are Women Fools?” in The Sentinel: Milwaukee, July 29, 1885.

^[71] On stylistic relationships between songs and piano works in Hensel’s output see R. Larry Todd, “Fanny Hensel’s Lieder (ohne Worte) and the Boundaries of Song: the Curious Case of the Lied in D Flat Major, op. 8, no. 3,” in The Songs of Fanny Hensel, ed. Stephen Rodgers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 217–23.

^[72] “American Music: Dvorak Thinks Little Has Been Done Here.”

^[73] Lucy C. Lillie, The Story of Music and Musicians for Young Readers (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1886), 201.

^[74] Lewiston Daily Sun, June 13, 1902; Petaluma Argus-Courier, July 28, 1902; and Evening Bulletin [Honolulu], August 6, 1902.

^[75] “Stokowski Woman Orchestra Idea has Warm Supporters.”

^[76] Molly Elliott Seawell, “On the Absence of the Creative Faculty in Women,” The Critic 16, no. 413 (November 28, 1891): 292.

^[77] T. W. H., “The Lilliputian Theory of Woman,” Harper’s Bazaar 24, no. 52 (December 26, 1891): 1014.

^[78] Molly Elliott Seawell, “The Lilliputian Theory of Woman” [letter to the editor], The Critic 18, no. 543 (July 16, 1892): 36.

^[79] Edith Brower, “Is the Musical Idea Masculine?” The Atlantic Monthly 73 (1894): 332.

^[80] G. G. Buckler, “The Lesser Man,” The North American Review 165 (1897): 304.

^[81] Alexander Sutherland, “Woman’s Brain,” The Nineteenth Century 47, no. 279 (May 1900): 808.

^[82] Mary Hallock [Greenewalt], “Women’s Music Clubs,” The Musician 16, no. 9 (1911): 581.

^[83] Catherine French Benton, Woman’s Club Work and Programs (Boston: D. Estes, 1913), 278; General Federation Bulletin 14 (August 1915): 16.

^[84] 1903–1904 Program, State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City; Albuquerque Morning Journal, February 18, 1922; Morning Oregonian, October 11, 1933.

^[85] “First Concert an Artistic Success,” The Scranton Tribune, May 11, 1897.

^[86] Katharine Burrowes, “Methods of Interesting Students in Musical Study,” The Etude 20, no. 3 (March 1902): 94.

^[87] Henrietta C. Bastress, The Etude 22, no. 6 (June 1904): 241.

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Appendix. Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s articles that mention Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel

“Fanny Mendelssohn.”

The Woman’s Journal, 4 March 1882.

“Women Authors Masquerading as Men.”

Harper’s Bazaar 18, no. 16 (April 18, 1885): 250.

“The Missing Musical Woman.”

Harper’s Bazaar 19, no. 29 (July 17, 1886): 462.
Women and Men (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1888).

“Repression at Long Range.”

Harper’s Bazaar 22, no. 26 (June 29, 1889): 474.
Woman’s Journal and Suffrage News 20, no. 25 (June 22, 1889): 200.
Concerning All of Us (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1892).

“Women as Poets.”

The Daily News [Denver, CO], December 8, 1889.
Concerning All of Us (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1892).

“The Lilliputian Theory of Woman.”

Harper’s Bazaar 24, no. 52 (December 26, 1891): 1014.
Woman’s Journal and Suffrage News 22, no. 52 (December 26, 1891): 424.
The Woman’s Column 4, no. 52 (December 26, 1891): 2.

 “The Advancing Line.”

Harper’s Bazaar 26, no. 32 (August 12, 1893): 650.