ABSTRACT
When I first came across a few annual volumes from the 1880s of The Girl’s Own Paper (TGOP) in the stacks of a major academic library, I was searching for information about female organists in nineteenth-century England.1 My efforts were rewarded. Illustrations of young women on the organ bench in church lofts, fiction featuring young heroines who played the organ, replies to correspondents about organs and organ playing, reviews of organ books and occasional music scores composed for American organ or harmonium all suggested that organists were among the magazine’s readers.
