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.
Not surprisingly, the article came under attack from many directions. Dame Ethel Smyth
responded in the next issue of the Sunday Times: It surprises me that so brilliant an intelligence should not remember that...
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...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Evelyn Glover
As the play opens, Miss Appleyard believes that she sympathises with the anti cause and casually dismisses the dreadful Suffragists
Glover, Evelyn. “Miss Appleyard’s Awakening”. How the Vote Was Won: and Other Suffragette Plays, edited by Dale Spender and Carole Hayman, Methuen, pp. 115-24.
117
and their desire to involve themselves in politics. But a visit from Mrs Crabtree...
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
Anthologization
Nina Hamnett
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...
Literary responses
Winifred Holtby
South Riding was enormously successful. It was chosen by the Book Society
as their Book of the Month for March, and sold 25,000 copies within the first three weeks of its publication. In 1937 it...
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...
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.
335
but was hesitant about—even repelled by—sexual intimacy...
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
.
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.
181
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.
132
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 Elizabeth Edith, Countess of Balfour, Heinemann.
236-7
That summer CL
realised that we loved each other, and no mistake. From that...
