Jane Austen's Music Collection, Now Digitized and Available Online

Open Culture: “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like,” says the narrator of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. “It’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently.” That master English social novelist of the late 20th century made a point with which Jane Austen, the master English social novelist in the early 19th century, may well have agreed. Hornby, like his character, loves and collects music, even into this 21st century when the very definition of a music collection has expanded into unrecognizability. Jane Austen did as well, though collecting music in her day meant something else again: collecting sheet music.