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.
246
As a passionate suffragist, ES
wrote to show how these wretched sex-considerations were really the fashioning factor of my life.
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.
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.
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.
Among other autobiographical topics, ES
writes here of following the hounds with the famous Quorn Hunt
of Leicestershire in England, and of holidays: in Sicily with Ethel Smyth
in 1920, and in Spain in...
Textual Production
Stevie Smith
SS
's list of requisites for a critic or reviewer goes like this: Attention, impartiality, and no regard for age or sex.
Smith, Stevie. Me Again. Editors Barbera, Jack and William McBrien, Vintage.
173
In April 1941 she was reviewing for John O'London's, Country Life...
Textual Production
Inez Bensusan
This protest was one of many forms of resistance the WSPU advocated in order to put pressure on the government to give women the vote. Women were also encouraged to withhold their taxes. Leaders of...
Textual Production
Cicely Hamilton
CH
wrote the words for Ethel Smyth
's suffrage anthem, The March of the Women.
Whitelaw, Lis. The Life and Rebellious Times of Cicely Hamilton. Women’s Press.
122
Textual Production
Margaret Haig, Viscountess Rhondda
Time and Tide carried two excerpts from Woolf
's A Room of One's Own in November 1929, and the next year MHVR
wrote two series of articles on the treatment of women and gender in...
Textual Production
Edith Somerville
ES
sold three book-manuscripts, to raise money, in 1934. But a voluminous collection of her papers, including diaries and letters by herself and her cousin MR, and letters from Ethel Smyth
, descended to two...
Textual Production
Christopher St John
CSJ
, Smyth's literary executor, published her Ethel Smyth
. A Biography, with additional chapters by Vita Sackville-West
and Kathleen Dale
.
British Book News. British Council.
(1959): 345
Auerbach, Nina. Ellen Terry: Player in Her Time. W.W. Norton.
Looking back on the texts of the suffrage movement, Virginia Woolf
contrasted EP
's still style
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
5: 211
with the livelier one of Ethel Smyth
.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
5: 210-11
Textual Features
Margaret Haig, Viscountess Rhondda
MHVR
humbly considers herself merely a normal person,
Margaret Haig, Viscountess Rhondda,. This Was My World. Macmillan.
x
writing what she has seen with the eyes of the mind.
Margaret Haig, Viscountess Rhondda,. This Was My World. Macmillan.
xii
The work is not a complete reconstruction of her life, since it wraps...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Robins
Both Sides of the Curtain covers ER
's relations with the theatre knights Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree
and Sir Henry Irving
. According to Woolf (who found it a fascinating book, despite its portraits of...
Usborne, Karen. "Elizabeth": The Author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden. Bodley Head.
275, 287, 290
Reception
Virginia Woolf
VW
wrote to Ethel Smyth
that the stories were diversions or treats I allowed myself when I had done my exercise in the conventional style.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
4: 231
An Unwritten Novel, she said, showed her...
Reception
Virginia Woolf
VW
feared this would be thought a dull meticulous book. She declined to send Ethel Smyth
a copy, supposing that it would be puzzling and frustrating to someone who had not known its subject. She...
Publishing
Vernon Lee
Lee may have been introduced to the Woolfs by any one of a number of her London friends; in later years Virginia Woolf heard much more about her from their mutual friend Ethel Smyth
.
