Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Ethel Smyth
-
Standard Name: Smyth, Ethel
Birth Name: Ethel Mary Smyth
All of ES
's writings are richly autobiographical. They provide an acute and open account of her experience as a woman entering a strictly delimited male field (in her case that of composing large-scale musical works). Her friend Vita Sackville-West
somewhat waspishly suggested that ESmight concisely have entitled her successive books ME ONE, ME TWO, ME THREE, and so on.
St John, Christopher. Ethel Smyth. Longmans, Green, 1959.
246
As a passionate suffragist, ES
wrote to show how these wretched sex-considerations were really the fashioning factor of my life.
qtd. in
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
In particular, her work supports women in music, expresses her own frustrations with exclusion from English musical life, and analyses the complex of public interest, middlemen, and other conditions that I call the Machine.
qtd. in
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
In the same year that she published her first book, NH
also contributed an essay, What I Wore in the Nineties, to a book of childhood reminiscences compiled by Ethel Smyth
and entitled Little...
Cultural formation
Vernon Lee
VL
also gathered followers whom Ethel Smyth
called cultes: women whose admiration for her intellectual and social successes was often accompanied by erotic feeling, which Lee returned.
Colby, Vineta. Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. University of Virginia Press, 2003.
132
Cultural formation
Vernon Lee
In her biography of Lee, Vineta Colby
repeats longstanding judgments about the author's sexuality by emphasizing that she made no effort to conceal her attachments to women,
Colby, Vineta. Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. University of Virginia Press, 2003.
335
but was hesitant about—even repelled by—sexual intimacy...
death
Emmeline Pankhurst
A statue in her honour was unveiled in Victoria Tower Gardens on 6 March 1930; Dame Ethel Smyth
conducted The March of the Women at the ceremony. A portrait done by Georgina Brackenbury
hangs in...
Family and Intimate relationships
Dorothy Bussy
Dorothy's immediate family was large and vibrant: she had nine surviving siblings, most of whom distinguished themselves in the public realm. Her sister Philippa (Pippa) Strachey
(1872-1968) was a longtime suffragist who organized the first...
Family and Intimate relationships
Emmeline Pankhurst
By 1913, EP
had moved to live with composer Ethel Smyth
at her cottage in Woking. The latter hints at a sexual relationship in her book Female Pipings in Eden and suggests that this...
Family and Intimate relationships
Emmeline Pankhurst
She intended to spearhead a campaign to provide a better start in life for the illegitimate children of soldiers and reluctant mothers. (Ethel Smyth
tried to dissuade her, took it philosophically when she was...
Family and Intimate relationships
Marghanita Laski
The political theorist Harold Laski
was ML
's uncle. Laski, a professor at the London School of Economics, was the best-known socialist intellectual of his era. His books on the Second World War, the...
Friends, Associates
Vernon Lee
VL
and Ethel Smyth
began a lasting friendship when they were introduced at the Windsor home of Lady Mary Ponsonby
.
Colby, Vineta. Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. University of Virginia Press, 2003.
181
Friends, Associates
Edith Somerville
ES
first met Ethel Smyth
(and also Maurice Baring
), on the way to Lady Kenmare
's, Killarney House, County Kerry.
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber, 1968.
188
Friends, Associates
Edith Somerville
Somerville and Smyth
became close friends, and visited and travelled together, though biographer Maurice Collis
thinks that Smyth
expected a sexual relationship where Somerville did not.
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber, 1968.
VW
met and began a friendship with Ethel Smyth
, a generation older than herself: composer, author, militant suffragist, former close friend and future biographer of Emmeline Pankhurst
.
Bishop, Edward. A Virginia Woolf Chronology. Macmillan, 1989.
128
Friends, Associates
Constance Lytton
From two days after her stroke until September 1918 she had the joy of a perfect nurse,Nurse Oram
.
Lytton, Constance. Letters of Constance Lytton. Editor Balfour, Elizabeth Edith, Countess of, Heinemann, 1925.
236-7
That summer CL
realised that we loved each other, and no mistake. From that...
Friends, Associates
Emmeline Pankhurst
On 5 March 1912 EP
was again thrown into Holloway, along with a great many other suffragettes. During this incarceration she cultivated a friendship with composer Ethel Smyth
.
Pankhurst, Sylvia. The Life of Emmeline Pankhurst. Kraus Reprint, 1969.
Seddon, Laura. “Patronage and the Development of Women’s Music in the Early Twentieth Century”. Women’s History Magazine, No. 68, Women’s History Network, 2012, pp. 28-32.
Seddon 28-30
Late October 2009: The BBC first opened to the public its sound...
Building item
Late October 2009
The BBC
first opened to the public its sound archive entitled Suffragette Voices.