ABSTRACT
The choices Elizabeth Stirling and her colleagues made in their careers given the social climate at the time offer examples of opportunities and constraints encountered by female organists while pursuing work as church musicians in nineteenth-century England. Stirling, who lived and worked in Poplar near the church, may have practised on the organ at All Saints', where her mentor Augusta Holmes was the organist. During the years that Stirling was organist at All Saints', Poplar, and other female organists well known at the time held positions in London churches. When Stirling began her position as organist at St Andrew Under shaft, the organ was in a west gallery loft built at the end of the seventeenth century especially for the instrument. When Stirling took her post as organist at St Andrew Under shaft in 1858, she was one of many female organists playing in London-area churches.
