Writing about the human voice from a period before the invention of mechanical recording presents a conundrum for the historian and researcher: how do we interpolate and triangulate other forms of evidence to create a palpable understanding of these lost singing voices? David Kennerley's Sounding Feminine: Women's Voices in British Musical Culture, 1780–1850 ends almost two decades before extant evidence of the human voice, provided by the American inventor Thomas Edison who famously recorded himself reciting nursery rhymes in 1877. Researching the female singing voice presents further challenges in that it was highly circumscribed and regulated during the period of Kennerley's study through a masculinist musical culture in particular and patriarchy in general. But far from this book being an abstract study of lost voices, Kennerley brings his subject to life through a series of meticulously researched and thoroughly engaging case studies situated within some fascinating contextual history.

Kennerley's detailed section on conduct literature early on in the book offers invaluable insight into the ways in which women's musicality was policed in private and social settings, often by evangelically motivated women writers who gave advice on moral decorum, including the limits of musical performance and display. Popular conduct literature from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries clearly demonstrates the contradictions faced by women as anxieties arose around their increasing occupation of public spaces. Initially, young middle-class women were encouraged to develop and display their musical accomplishments inasmuch as these might attract a husband or advance their social position, but only within tightly prescribed boundaries. Too much musical accomplishment might signal a neglect of religious piety and a deleterious addiction to the spotlight, for example. Furthermore, any association with the stage could condemn their reputations as promiscuous libertines. Kennerley's study shows that even those single young women who successfully negotiated outlets for their musicality were inevitably silenced on marriage and had to sacrifice their talents to domesticity and motherhood. Women singers, like their male counterparts, were also subject to religious dogma which permeated British society and music culture to a surprising extent; from the Quakers who decried all forms of musical performance, to Protestantism which tolerated music associated with respectful worship and Catholicism, which actively promoted more passionate vocal participation in religious ceremony.

Kennerley's well-pitched contextual research provides detailed grounding for his case studies on female singers emerging during this period; pioneers like Catherine Stephens, Eliza Vestris, Giuditta Pasta, and Dorothea Solly who forged pathways for future women singers. Very much in the public domain, these women were subject to conflicting attitudes and cultural tastes which pitched Italian opera against British theatre, restraint against passion, and English against Continental music cultures, even before they had begun to negotiate complex issues around class, nationality, and gender. Further vignettes featuring Adelaide Kemble, Clara Novello, and Marianne Lincoln bring the study into the mid-nineteenth century, when women's rights were being articulated by the likes of Mary Wollstonecraft and attitudes were starting to modernize. All three of these women gained considerable publicity and popularity, though their personal testimonies indicate the challenges that they faced, often in the face of a misogynist and masculinist musical establishment including the orchestra directors and conductors with whom they worked. We can easily diagnose these men as professional bullies who might have enjoyed humiliating young female singers in front of their orchestras, but as Lincoln's diary attests such experiences did erode their confidence and forced them to question their abilities and experience.

This was also the period during which contested ideas around how the embodied female singing voice should be performed were widely debated in the music and popular press. Women singers were expected to display emotion and character, particularly when performing arias, while remaining demure and “feminine.” Too much dramatic interpretation earned them vile epithets such as “monstrous” or “disgusting” while too little passion rendered them cold, inexpressive, and “too English” (188). Novello herself fell victim to contradictory critical and public tastes. Deemed too restrained, she was sent to Italy to learn more “passion” (170), only to get booed on her return when she performed precisely that same passion that critics had demanded from her. Kennerley paints a vivid picture of the sheer hard work and training which these women devoted to their art, despite the opprobrium that they often faced, and offers testament to their determination in continuing their careers.

Kennerley ends his case studies on a more positive note with an account of Clara Novello's performance at the opening of the Crystal Palace in 1854, where her singing voice was lauded for its clarity and resonance in the acoustically challenging glass dome. At last, as we entered the Victorian age, it felt as if women's voices were becoming acceptable in popular and middle-brow culture. Kennerley considers the decline of evangelical influence, particularly with its association between original sin and the female body, as key here. He makes a strong argument for changing attitudes to women's voices as not only a barometer of shifting musical tastes, but of a decline in religious and class deference and an upswing in women's participation in social and political cultures. Their increasing acceptance signaled a new Victorian femininity that would find full expression in the early suffragettes and see a burgeoning participation of women studying in the new music academies from the mid-nineteenth century.

Although we can never hear the women's voices that Kennerley has so meticulously researched and vividly described here, we can get a visceral sense of their physical and aural presence amidst the social and cultural contexts that shaped them. This excellent and entertaining book also speaks to a rich vein of research into women's musicality which includes Leah Broad's critically acclaimed Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World (2023), about the lives of four women composers all but forgotten from historical accounts. Likewise, Kennerley's book fully deserves to reach a wider readership, including anyone interested in women's history as well as historical female music cultures and debates which still resonate with women's performance to this day.