Name: Ethel Smyth (1858-1944)
Hometown: Sidcup, United Kingdom
Listen to: ‘The Prison’, ‘The March of the Women’, ‘Piano Sonata No. 1 in C Major’
A member of the women’s suffrage movement Ethel Smyth composed songs, piano works, chamber music, orchestral works, and vocal music. As a female composer, her work was often bypassed by the mainstream world, yet when she composed more delicate music she was criticised for writing subordinately to her male contemporaries. Tchaikovsky, however, commented “Miss Smyth is one of the few women composers whom one can seriously consider to be achieving something valuable in the field of musical creation”. Smyth wrote to her librettist, Henry Bennet Brewster, in 1892, contemplating “why it is so much easier for me to love my own sex passionately than yours. I can’t make it out for I am a very healthy-minded person”. She had several affairs with women in her lifetime, and even fell in love, albeit unrequitedly, with both Emmeline Pankhurst and Virginia Woolf.