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
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...
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
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...
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...
Textual Features Emmeline Pankhurst
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
Friends, Associates Lady Ottoline Morrell
LOM continued to entertain in London, hosting such guests as Ethel Smyth , Elizabeth Bowen , Stephen Spender , Max Beerbohm , Hope Mirrlees , Djuna Barnes , Charlie Chaplin , the novelist Henry Green
Occupation Margaret Haig, Viscountess Rhondda
Women contributors ranged widely: Rebecca West , Stella Benson , Cicely Hamilton , Members of Parliament Lady Nancy Astor and Ellen Wilkinson , Virginia Woolf , Naomi Mitchison , E. M. Delafield , Rose Macaulay
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 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...
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...
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
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 .

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