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 Edith Somerville
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.
190
It seems that Smyth later gave Virginia Woolf
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...

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Texts

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