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.
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.
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
politics
Edith Somerville
Next February she wrote to Ethel Smyth
that the Black and Tans were worse than Sinn Féin
(the Republicans). Smyth, as an Englishwoman, found this hard to believe. When the Republicans took for themselves (virtually...
politics
Edith Somerville
Perhaps with Ethel Smyth
's encouragement, ES
signed a letter to the newspapers protesting at the mutilation of Joyce
's Ulysses by its American publishers.
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber.
229
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
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
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
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Edith Somerville
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
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.
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
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...
