Ethel Smyth

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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.
Black and white photograph of Ethel Smyth, shown from the shoulders up. She is wearing a tweed suit jacket with a white shirt underneath and a tie. Her dark is pulled into a bun on the top of her head.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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.
106
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
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Noel Streatfeild
Apple Bough, 1962 (illustrated by Margery Gill , published as Traveling Shoes in the USA), is remarkable from a feminist point of view for the name of the youngest child in the central family...
Leisure and Society Edith Somerville
In her later years ES set out to extend her reading. She tried Woolf 's A Room of One's Own (at the behest of Ethel Smyth ) and admired it. But she could not like...
Literary responses Enid Bagnold
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...
Literary responses Edith Somerville
It was well reviewed in The Times, and was reprinted four times by January 1918.
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber.
183, 185
ES received a letter of appreciation from Ethel Smyth .
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber.
185
Literary responses Virginia Woolf
Ethel Smyth sent her responses to this book by telegram on publication day: Book astounding so far. Agitatingly increases value of life. Two days later she sent: Final paragraph almost smashes machine of life with...
Literary responses Radclyffe Hall
A number of writers rallied in support of RH . E. M. Forster and Leonard Woolf drafted a letter protesting the suppression of The Well of Loneliness. Its signatories included Bernard Shaw , T. S. Eliot
Literary responses Edith Somerville
Ethel Smyth saw the book at proof stage, and was pleased; she praised it again in her Streaks of Life.
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber.
189, 197
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...
Literary responses Vita Sackville-West
There was a widespread feeling that VSW had been too circumspect and scholarly. Virginia Woolf told Vita that she found the book solid, strong, satisfactory
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
6: 49
, but wished she had allowed herself a...
Literary responses Christopher St John
CSJ 's drama and music criticism drew admiration from Ethel Smyth , who wrote in A Final Burning of Boats: I am acquainted with no more typical instance of a first-line female intelligence and how it works.
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.
941
Literary responses Vita Sackville-West
Virginia Woolf reported that she read it like a shark swallowing mackerel. I think its [sic] far better than Saint Joan, more masterly and controlled. She added: It must be a bestseller into the...
Occupation Edith Somerville
Smyth helped her mount this first exhibition and several others, and she wrote a preface to the catalogue for the first one. The exhibitions were an important source of income for ES .
Cronin, John. Somerville and Ross. Bucknell University Press.
88, 95

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