"An extraordinarily detailed account....Through a great deal of archival research, excellent organization of the text, an incisive and fluent writing style, a clear understanding of the social and artistic scene during the Gilded Age and beyond, and careful documentation, the author has vividly described one important facet of 'women's aspirations to the world of high art.'"
Music Reference Services Quarterly "Beautifully designed. . . . Such a carefully researched and highly readable study of women's recitation is captivating and sorely needed."
American Music "Wilson Kimber's writing is as engaging as it is meticulous, her research rich and nuanced but clear as a bell."
Iowa Public Radio "An important resource for those interested in speech and drama, rhetoric, music, and women's studies. Highly recommended."
Choice "Ultimately, Wilson Kimber rewards the reader with the special care she took to illuminate not just the history she details, but many contexts and meanings for the women involved and the ones to come after them."
Nineteenth-Century Music Review "A fascinating book."
Santa Fe New Mexican "The Elocutionists adds an important counter narrative to our understanding of women's gendered and musical performances during this period."
Journal of Musicological Research "An extraordinarily detailed account....Through a great deal of archival research, excellent organization of the text, an incisive and fluent writing style, a clear understanding of the social and artistic scene during the Gilded Age and beyond, and careful documentation, the author has vividly described one important facet of 'women's aspirations to the world of high art.'"
Music Reference Services Quarterly "Her informative survey of this little-known terrain may be a stimulus to engage both more deeply and more broadly with the connections between signing, speech, music, rhetoric, and society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."
Music & Letters "Kimber's analysis of women's dialect recitations offers valuable insight into women's place on the stage and in broader performing culture."
The Annals of Iowa "Seen as a whole, Marion Wilson Kimber's The Elocutionists is a meticulously documented, compensatory history of a forgotten women's musical performance genre. The author expertly situates her primary and secondary source research among that of others in copious endnotes accounting for one-sixth of the book's 330 pages."
Nineteenth Century Music Review "In her fascinating and long-needed study, Wilson Kimber reconstitutes and interprets a set of pervasive but neglected practices that include not only elocution but also melodramatic performance, recitation in combination with music, and the activities of the verse speaking choir. In so doing, she helps to recover an elusive but crucial element of cultural history: the sound of women's lives."
Joan Shelley Rubin, author of Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America "A century ago, popular literature reached many Americans through the interpretive voices of women, women who
typically barred from the men's world of political oratory
cultivated a performance art in the home, the theater, on the traveling circuit. While revealing the huge variety of music used to accompany spoken narration, Wilson Kimber brings alive again the forgotten art of elocution through a close examination of the 'sentimental keepsakes' and pedagogical traditions it sought to preserve."
Michael V. Pisani, Vassar College