From the 1920s to the 1940s, Leo Sowerby created popular secular works while his sacred compositions led admirers to call him the “dean of American church musicians.” Yet in time, Sowerby’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Canticle of the Sun and the rest of his corpus lost favor with the A-list symphonies and prominent musicians who had once made him a fixture in their repertoires. Joseph Sargent’s biography offers the first focused study of Sowerby’s life and work against the backdrop of the composer’s place in American music. As Sargent shows, Sowerby’s present-day marginalization as a composer relates less to the quality of his work than the fact that today’s historiographical practices and canon-building activities minimize modern church music. Sargent’s re-evaluation draws on a wide range of perspectives and composer’s music and writings to enrich detailed analyses of musical works and a career-spanning consideration of Sowerby’s musical language and aesthetic priorities.

Githa Sowerby’s Rutherford and Son took the London theatre by storm in 1912. Following its triumphant run, the play toured to New York, was produced throughout England, and was translated and staged in multiple European locations. Yet Sowerby’s initial theatrical success would not be repeated. With historical hindsight, we can see Sowerby’s experience as comparable to that of many other women writers who struggled to achieve lasting recognition, especially when their work was perceived as critiquing the forces restricting women’s lives. These vivid domestic dramas explore timely questions of capitalism, feminism, and personal freedom. With the acclaimed revival of Rutherford at the National Theatre in 1994, and with the efforts by feminist scholars and theatre artists to rediscover the work of such forgotten women writers, Sowerby and her dramas have secured renewed interest. This edition gathers Rutherford and Son, its companion piece A Man and Some Women, and the postwar play The Stepmother. The edition will provide teachers, students, and artists with important historical contexts for Sowerby’s dramas and will demonstrate the ongoing cogency of these dynamic, insightful, and engaging plays.

James Sowerby (1757-1822) was an outstanding artist and natural historian, renowned for his discoveries and prodigious output of beautiful, scientific books of plants, fungi, animals, fossils and minerals, all at a key historical time; the age of Enlightenment in Great Britain.Beautifully illustrated with artwork and letter and manuscript extracts, this first full biography of Sowerby is a fascinating artistic and historical account, which extends beyond that of one key player.