Cécile Chaminade is no longer a household name, or even a recognisable name, even in a time when female composers are being rediscovered and celebrated. I’ve loved her since I was a little boy visiting Hoylake for piano lessons with Heather Slade-Lipkin – her mother used to play Chaminade for me. It seems extraordinary now, but every time Joan would sit down at the piano for this opened-eyed little boy, devouring music like I was in a sweet shop, it was Chaminade’s Automne, or her Scarf Dance, or the tricky Toccata. One treat after another.

I’m playing a lot of Chaminade this season; or, more accurately, I’m playing a few pieces of hers many times – alongside three of the great, 30-minute masterpieces of 19th-century piano music: the Schumann Fantasie, and the B minor Sonatas of Liszt and Chopin. To those surprised by the juxtaposition, I think Chaminade sits very comfortably and proudly there, not because her elegant miniatures are comparable in scope and ambition to those three greatest keyboard works of the 19th century by three geniuses, but because she shared an important place with them in the most popular performance venue of the Romantic era: the salon.

Salons have pretty much disappeared today (apart from those who try to resurrect the idea – a musical equivalent of jousting on the village green or taking a ride on a steam train) so we tend to forget that for most of the 19th century solo piano recitals in large public spaces were rare. It was the salon – a large room in a large private home to which music lovers would be invited – which was ubiquitous. Chopin’s whole creative life was fuelled by these opportunities for his music to be heard. His pieces were almost all dedicated to various countesses and rich patrons who would invite him to play for them; the intimate setting of a dozen people listening quietly in an elegant private room was his chosen space.

All the great 19th-century composers wrote some music specifically for amateurs to play at home. Apart from anything else, it was their main source of income. If you had the money and space for a china cabinet it’s likely you’d have a piano in the same room too. Pretty much everyone who had the time and leisure to read a book would have learned the piano as well. Especially women.

Enter Cécile Chaminade. She was born in 1857 into a musical family, receiving her first piano lessons from her mother. When she was 10 she was accepted for study at the Paris Conservatoire but her father forbade it, so she studied with various of its professors privately. Although all women of a certain class at the time were encouraged to play the piano at home, it was unusual for them to be allowed to pursue a career doing so. In fact, women were generally discouraged from travelling or dining alone, two activities which fill the lives of touring concert performers.

One of the keys to understanding the paucity of female composers until the 20th century is that composers generally wrote music for themselves to play, whether in public venues or the more private world of the salon. So if a performing career was not a possibility for a woman then neither was writing music. Chaminade is one of the few who were able to ride over this restriction, a witness to her determination and her popularity.

And Chaminade was exceptionally successful for a while. She played her music all over Europe, including for Queen Victoria who gave her the Jubilee medal in 1897; her Prélude for organ Op 78 was played at the monarch’s funeral. Most of her large output was written between the 1880s and 90s and she had an enormous international renown. Her Scarf Dance alone is said to have sold more than five million copies. In the US hundreds of women across the continent around the turn of the 20th century founded and joined Chaminade Clubs, from Yonkers, New York to Jackson, Mississippi – two of the many which exist to this day, and still present concerts.

Chaminade married a music publisher but they lived in a platonic relationship and separately, he in Marseille and she in Paris. He died in 1907 and she never remarried. It’s hard not to draw certain conclusions from this – a further indication of the restrictions of the age.

Then, soon after his death, and to the end of her life, more than 35 years later … silence. The composing dried up. The performances ceased. The accolades became a distant memory. Ironically, the postwar era of greater emancipation for women passed Chaminade by. It’s astonishing to realise that she died as late as 1944. Alone in Monte Carlo.

Where to place her in the rich period of French musical history that coincided with her life? She has something of the sweetness of Massenet, Delibes, Gounod and other Romantics; we hear the pianistic confidence of Saint-Saëns in the elegant glitter of her figuration; early Fauré’s shifting melancholy is present at times. Her music is at least as charming and lyrical as Debussy’s in his early Arabesques and Clair de Lune. Like Chopin she was a composer of meticulous craft; like Liszt she knew how to make the piano sparkle; and like Schumann there are many moments of tender poetry. She would have loved and played all three composers, and I have the sense she would have been delighted to take her place once more alongside them.

• Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center presents An Evening with Sir Stephen Hough at David Geffen Hall, New York City, on 24 November; Stephen Hough plays Chaminade, Chopin and Schumann at the Barbican, London, on 4 December.