“Be bravely singular,” Augusta Browne Garrett (ca. 1820–82) exhorted readers during her later years, writing with an uncommon voice that extended across five decades of publication in music and literature. Her lively musical compositions, music journalism, and prose present an engaging period voice that has been neglected for too long. Only in recent years have Browne's creative works become available through digitization. Two centuries after her birth, it is high time to uncover the life and reassess the achievements of this versatile musician and woman of letters.

I grew intrigued as I encountered Augusta Browne's music and articles in a trove of nineteenth-century American monthlies that included the best-selling Godey's Magazine as well as a dozen other periodical titles. In 1985 I incorporated her attractive Columbian Quick-Step, published in the Columbian Magazine, into my lecture-recitals of music by women composers. The persistent pattern of entrepreneurship—of producing, selling, and promoting her music and prose—leaped out from the magazine pages. She was a self-marketer in an era that we rarely associate with businesswomen.

Judith Tick rediscovered Browne's contributions in music and prose as part of her doctoral dissertation. Tick produced an insightful sketch of the composer and author in her seminal study of American women composers, but a comprehensive biography was never her goal. At the time of writing, she acknowledged, “Of her education and musical training we know nothing.” My research began with unearthing Browne's family history, which in turn revealed her musical education and explained much of her trajectory in life.

The rolls of canonic works in literature and the arts have routinely been ordered by male critics, resulting in lists of “masterworks” that privilege excellence and genius as white and male. When I attended college, none of my music courses included the name of any woman composer. During graduate school, I learned about only one, Hildegard of Bingen, in a course on medieval music. It was a joyful discovery in my research to find a world of women who contributed music to magazines published during the twentieth, nineteenth, eighteenth, and even the seventeenth centuries.