Music and Song’ considers the range of music with which Goldsmith engaged and argues that he always recognized the ways in which music could be repurposed, could be poignant and moving or farcical and absurd, and could transcend even the most apparently secure of generic and cultural boundaries. Goldsmith’s tastes were eclectic in terms of music as in so much else and this eclecticism could lend itself readily to hybrid forms: the publication of the earliest surviving record of the life of the Irish harpist-composer, Turlough Carolan (1760), who fused Irish traditional harping with baroque traditions; the reworking of the sung ballad ‘Death and the Maiden’ as a formal oratorio, Threnodia Augustalis, to commemorate the death of Augusta, Princess Dowager; the idea of a comic ‘epilogue in singing’.

In this chapter, female homosocial relationships are explored as confident articulations of female identity and as suggestive models of political governance. Despite widespread anxiety about female-only assembly and scepticism regarding the virtues of female friendship, women writers in this period evidently found friendship between women to be a theme in which they could articulate and explore a range of feelings and emotions not otherwise sanctioned by their culture. The chapter considers a range of poetry and fiction – by Charlotte McCarthy, Margaret Goddard, Olivia Elder, Frances Sheridan and her daughter Elizabeth – in relation to differentially situated ideas of ‘sisterhood’ before turning to the ways in which Ireland came to be figured as a ‘sister’ kingdom to Britain in the later century, thus shaping the proto-feminism of earlier traditions in new, national formations.

In this chapter, female homosocial relationships are explored as confident articulations of female identity and as suggestive models of political governance. Despite widespread anxiety about female-only assembly and scepticism regarding the virtues of female friendship, women writers in this period evidently found friendship between women to be a theme in which they could articulate and explore a range of feelings and emotions not otherwise sanctioned by their culture. The chapter considers a range of poetry and fiction – by Charlotte McCarthy, Margaret Goddard, Olivia Elder, Frances Sheridan, and her daughter Elizabeth – in relation to differentially situated ideas of ‘sisterhood’ before turning to the ways in which Ireland came to be figured as a ‘sister’ kingdom to Britain in the later century, thus shaping the proto-feminism of earlier traditions in new, national formations.