With a focus on George Sand as a reader of E.T.A. Hoffmann, this dissertation offers a feminist reading of the figure of the musician and traces how Sand, through her continual engagement with Hoffmann's work over the course of her career, rewrites the narrative space of music from one of aesthetics to one of both aesthetics and of caring, ethical relations. While critics agree that Hoffmann's writing had a significant impact on Sand's fantastic and musical fiction, this study investigates the strategies via which Sand departs from Hoffmann's project. Over the course of her career, this departure, neither immediate nor easy, structures Sand's transformation of narratives that position the female singer as the composer's muse and as, what I am calling, his musical double. In addition to foregrounding the emergence of the female voice against the cult of the artist, Sand redirects her focus to folk music, from the art music central to Hoffmann's aesthetics, and privileges the social body, including the maternal, familial, and collective social bodies, over the individual artistic genius. As she demythologizes, re-historicizes, and re-embodies the female musical figure, Sand plays with the possibilities that visceral, personal and interpersonal responses to music offer for narratives of social relationships, and writes community formation, via musical scenes, as a function of the reciprocity of affective, artistic expression. Thus, while scholarship on nineteenth-century literature has often focused on the gaze, specifically a male gaze, I investigate here the role of the acoustic in literature and situate the acoustic as a generative medium of intersubjectivity and community.