Ann Mounsey, married to William Bartholemew, chose to go by her maiden name in her working life. There are many reasons as to why she chose to go by a different name in her working/professional life over her legal name. One possibility being that she preferred to have some distance between her professional life and her domestic life. This could have been to help her stay anonymous and maintain ownership of her own intellectual property and art. Women at the time were given far fewer opportunities to work and create independence for themselves so this false-name gave Mounsey distance from her personal life in her career. Another possibility as to why she chose to write under Mounsey is to further market her as a teacher figure. Because so much of her output consisted of pedagogical music to use for teaching and young musicians, it would make sense if she wanted to further that mindset for marketing purposes. She composed mainly works for voice and sought to create repertoire for young singers to use for pedagogical instruction. Her vast output of secular as well as sacred music highlights the trends of musical style a few decades prior, employing very classical melodies while pairing it with romantic and emotional text. This simplicity allowed her to access a new and growing audience - the amateur - giving them a taste for the art form without the exceeding difficulties of it.
A way to understand Mounsey's work is to consider two of her contemporaries, who were two of the most prominent female composers of the Romantic period: Fanny Hensel and Clara Schumann. Both composers worked as performers and were extremely skilled in their abilities, however, the two had very different experiences when it came to participating in music as a woman in the nineteenth century. Hensel largely contained her musical output to the domestic musical sphere and contributed her musical expertise to civically-minded performances that brought high quality musical experiences to broad audiences. This was a result mostly of her elite social class and her unique position as a member of the Mendelssohn family. Because she came from a wealthy background, pursuing music professionally would have been seen as taboo and was discouraged. Schumann, on the other hand, had a lower middle class upbringing, allowing her to seek out income from her musical talents without the risk of it damaging her status. Clara performed her own work in public concerts, seeking remuneration for her performances. Because both were women at a time when female independence and professionalization could be frowned upon, their own talents were quieted at times, either to appease the expectations of others, or because of an internalized misogyny that fell in line with the Conservative Romantic movement. Schumann was a huge critic of female composers, even of her own work, and she sought to stop “self-indulgent” virtuosity in her own compositions. In these two well- known composers we find two acceptable routes for female composers to take in their musical work at the time.
Mounsey’s career in some ways parallels both Schumann and Hensel. Like Schumann, Mounsey was able to work professionally as a musician as a result of her social class. Nonetheless, like Fanny Hensel (and her brother Felix), Mounsey appears to have been invested in the "civic" aspect of music, seeking to bring Romantic concert tastes to a broad amateur audience.
Title page of Mounsey's song "O the Merry Merry Spring!" from the Freedman Collection