Ethel Smyth – författare

Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) was an exceptional woman in an age rich in strong personalities. Best known for her opera The Wreckers, her music, long neglected, is gradually winning new friends. A feminist, intrepid traveller and sportswoman, she wrote nine volumes of autobiography, vividly recounting a life packed with incident.Aged nineteen, in the face of fierce opposition from her father, she went to Germany to study and 'plunged joyfully into the dear old sea of German music which surged about the feet of Brahms', befriending Schumann's widow, Clara, and the composer Heinrich von Herzogenberg and his wife, Lisl, the first of many women to whom Ethel was passionately attached.Her writings, abridged by Ronald Crichton, and including a catalogue of her music, are full of brilliant portraits - Brahms, Mahler, Beecham, Emmeline Pankhurst and Queen Victoria - all described in uncompromising detail. Numerous anecdotes range from hurling a brick through a cabinet minister's window, resulting in two months in Holloway prison - where she was observed, leaning through the bars, conducting her March of the Women with a toothbrush - to an Egyptian visit where she sought out a hermaphrodite in order to make an anatomical examination.

These intimate memoirs of one of the greatest composers of classical music, Ethel Smyth, are first-hand accounts of the remarkable woman’s life in music and in the suffragette movement.

Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) was an English composer and the first woman in her field to be granted a damehood. First published in 1919, this autobiography highlights her wit and humour, while giving personal and reflective insights into her childhood and working life. Detailing her career journey, exploring her relationships with some of history’s biggest names, and disclosing information regarding her activism for women’s suffrage, Ethel Smyth’s memoirs are a fascinating and insightful read.

This volume is divided into three parts:- The Smyth Family Robinson- Germany and Two Winters in Italy- In the Desert