Musical Virtue, Professional Fortune, and Private Trauma in Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Feminist Biography of Elisabetta de Gambarini (1730–65)

ABSTRACT The composer Elisabetta de Gambarini (1730–65) led a life of public and private contradictions. Publicly, she was renowned as both a professional performer and one of the first female composers to publish in Britain. Recently discovered documents at the British National Archives show, however, that her final year of life was marked by violence and physical abuse at the hands of her husband, Stephen Chazell. A feminist biography of Gambarini should not ignore or downplay her survivorhood, but should stress how she harnessed her virtue as a means of promoting herself as a female performer and composer whose entrepreneurial and publishing activities emulated those of male musicians. The documents themselves help us to understand how, despite her stature as a virtuous woman and a prominent public figure, she was erased from the narrative of her own abuse. In the age of #MeToo, Elisabetta’s biography provides an opportunity to reflect on how surviving trauma does not define a woman’s core identity; at the same time, it shows that ignoring assault and trauma in historical biography suppresses important lessons about believing women—lessons that are now more important than ever.