Gillian Dooley

Gillian Dooley's research and activities range across literature, music, and history. Combined with her training as a librarian, these interests make her the ideal person to work on Jane Austen's personal music collection, and over several years she has been indexing all the playable sheet music that survives from Austen's family collection. This labour of love, supplementing her lifelong love of singing and reading, led to her book She Played and Sang: Jane Austen and Music, published in 2024 by Manchester University Press. Gillian holds a PhD in English Literature from Flinders University in South Australia. Her other research interests include Iris Murdoch, whose musical links she has explored in Listening to Iris Murdoch: Music, Sounds, and Silences (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), V.S. Naipaul, J.M Coetzee, and the British maritime explorer Matthew Flinders, a contemporary of Jane Austen's who she has discovered was a gifted writer and an amateur musician as well as a skilled navigator and man of science. Along with monographs on these authors, she has also edited a number of books, including journals, letters, and interviews of several of these interesting figures, and co-edited some collections of essays on various topics.