Music and Literature: Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf, and “The First Woman to Write an Opera”


Music and Literature: Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf, and  

“The First Woman to Write an Opera” 

 

CHRISTOPHER WILEY 

 

 

I’m awfully proud—thats not the right phrase—that you’ve started again on the 

autobiography, partly owing to me. I was thinking the other night that there’s 

never been a womans autobiography. Nothing to compare with Rousseau. 

Chastity and modesty I suppose have been the reason. Now why shouldnt you be 

not only the first woman to write an opera, but equally the first to tell the truths 

about herself? Isnt the great artist the only person to tell the truth? I should like an 

analysis of your sex life. As Rousseau did his. More introspection. More intimacy. 

I leave it to you; for as you see I cant make my pen take my ply this cold morning. 

– Letter from Virginia Woolf to Ethel Smyth, 24 December 1940.1  

 

Ethel Smyth’s (1858–1944) later life was significantly enlivened by her frequent contact with 

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), from which a fruitful, if sometimes strained, friendship blossomed 

that was curtailed by Woolf’s suicide in March 1941. By the time of their first meeting in 

February 1930, Smyth, having overcome substantial opposition to her chosen career path and 

challenged traditional notions of the place of women within music composition internationally, 

had written six operas, a Mass, and many other chamber, orchestral, and vocal works, and was 

working on what was to be her last major composition, her oratorio The Prison.2 Her increasing 



 2 

deafness may have compelled her to develop a secondary career as writer of memoirs, 

biographical and other sketches, as well as polemical essays,3 but music remained her greatest 

passion, her first “string,” and her “real love.”4 Woolf had similarly attained the professional 

success that established her as a pioneering modernist by 1930, having published the first six of 

her nine novels, as well as many newspaper articles, book reviews, and other essays (some of 

which were collected in her anthology The Common Reader, the first volume of which had 

appeared in 1925), including her foundational feminist polemic, A Room of One’s Own (1929).5 

Investigation of the continuing intellectual dialogue that took place between these two 

pathbreaking artists enriches our understanding of wider differences between the disciplines of 

music and literature, their histories, canons, and art, as well as revealing much about the 

underrepresentation of women that both felt acutely, and against which they campaigned 

fervently in their writings.  

 One product of this dialogue was Woolf’s letter of 24 December 1940, written toward the 

end of their decade-long association. Her words have typically been cited by scholars as 

evidence either of the inherent difference between autobiographies merely written by women and 

a woman’s autobiography that delineated faithfully a complete existence, or of her belief that the 

latter could not be achieved through conventional male paradigms and therefore had the potential 

to elude classification as such.6 Woolf’s strange claim that no women’s autobiographies had 

been written by 1940 would seem, at face value, to stand up to little scrutiny. The very 

suggestion can hardly have been received positively, given that it was directed to someone who 

had recently published her fourth chronological volume of memoirs, which Woolf had read in 

the July of that year,7 not to mention several other collections of auto/biographical episodes and 

a travel-book.8 However, as I have explored in a previous study titled “‘When a woman speaks 



 3 

the truth about her body’: Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf, and the Challenges of Lesbian 

Auto/biography,” Woolf’s continual criticism of Smyth’s manifold literary undertakings, when 

read in conjunction with her biographical theories and feminist critiques, would seem to indicate 

her belief that Smyth’s writings could not be positioned as genuine women’s autobiographies.9 

Woolf held that her friend’s procedure of narrating stories exclusively relating to herself was 

overly egotistical, insisting on her own individuality through repeated use of the first-person 

singular; close reading of A Room of One’s Own identifies that she viewed this practice as 

phallocentric.10 By contrast, Woolf progressively edited out her own authorial voice from her 

texts, substituting those of multiple fictitious narrators in its place by way of endeavoring to 

reflect women’s multifaceted nature more accurately.  

The excerpt from Woolf’s correspondence quoted above provides a crucial piece in the 

epistemological jigsaw, in that Smyth’s perceived failure to relate faithfully her experiences as a 

woman in her autobiographical works is directly aligned with her omission to recount the truth 

about her sex life. Suzanne Raitt has commented that “[Smyth’s] published writing, although 

absolutely frank about the passion and the romance of her feelings for women, remains 

resolutely silent about the sexual aspects,”11 which is all the more revealing if one considers that 

an understanding of her sexuality is fundamental to an appreciation of her life and work. Rather 

than adopting Woolf’s more pluralistic outlook, however, Smyth continued to produce 

irredeemably self-centered narratives, preferring the masculine autobiographical model; perhaps 

she believed that this strategy offered the best available means for her to ingratiate herself within 

music’s strongly male-dominated canons. Thus, judged by Woolf’s criteria, she did not represent 

herself authentically as a woman and a lesbian in her texts.12  



 4 

 To probe further into the relationship between the two disparate artistic disciplines under 

scrutiny, consideration of Woolf’s curious statement from the point of view of music and 

musicology, rather than that of literature, proves illuminating. A parallel reading of the published 

texts and private correspondence of Smyth and Woolf may explicate the other far-reaching claim 

made in the course of the oft-quoted passage of the epigraph; for Woolf did not merely suggest 

that there had never been a woman’s autobiography, but also that Smyth was the first woman to 

compose an opera.13 The latter factual error has, quite understandably, often been overlooked by 

those scholars whose interest lies primarily within the realms of Woolf studies or women’s 

autobiography. Although Smyth had surprisingly little to say about other women composers, she 

did discuss one particular figure at some length, her older contemporary Augusta Holmès (1847–

1903), whose operas predated Smyth’s own.  

Reading Smyth on Holmès, Woolf should have recognized the inexactitude of her 

assertion. Woolf’s words may instead be understood to reflect the view that though Smyth’s 

autobiographies subscribed to traditional, masculine paradigms and hence did not represent her 

womanly experiences fully, her operas evinced a sympathy with her feminist and lesbian 

proclivities that is absent from her memoirs.14 After all, Smyth was keenly aware of the sexual 

prejudice she experienced throughout her compositional career, as well as the heavily gendered 

criticism prompted by her music.15 Modern hermeneutical readings of some of Smyth’s works 

through the lens of gender and sexuality, notably by Elizabeth Wood,16 have contributed weight 

to these arguments in two main areas: first, bringing to light her resistance to, and subversion of, 

gendered conventions established within music, such as her undermining and reappropriation of 

the principles of sonata form and her preference for the mezzo-soprano (rather than soprano) 

voice for operatic heroines; and second, calling attention to Smyth’s practice of inscribing 



 5 

herself, and others, into her music, by employing strategies analogous to those by which 

contemporary lesbian writers (including Woolf) eluded the censor by couching autobiography in 

the guise of thinly-veiled fictional narrative. Coming at such a pivotal juncture in her 

correspondence, Woolf may have had a deeper meaning in mind in making this claim, one 

inextricably linked to her strikingly bold statement on women’s autobiography.  

 Investigation of Woolf in relation to music has increased in recent years,17 with several 

scholars focusing specifically on aspects of her fascinating association with Smyth.18 That Woolf 

is invariably at the center of inquiry has led certain important aspects of the counterpoint 

between the two artists to be overlooked, not least the ways that Smyth, as an authority on music, 

directly influenced Woolf’s own writings.19 By shifting the focus to Smyth, this essay explores 

issues of specifically musicological relevance, such as the reasons why a woman composer might 

have constructed herself as a solitary figure, even within contexts in which the number of 

females actively creating music was recognizably growing. Smyth implicitly presented herself as 

standing apart from the improving status of women composers that was modestly starting to 

assert itself during her lifetime. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, music 

history chronicled a number of precedents for women writing opera, as well as the activities of 

sundry female contemporaries with whom Smyth was in direct contact.  

A comprehensive scrutiny of Smyth’s literary output reveals that its coverage of women 

composers other than herself was quite restricted and fitful, and often cast in a somewhat 

dismissive, unflattering vein, with telling traces of revisionism evident between her earlier and 

later writings. Smyth thus presented Woolf with an incomplete impression of the extent of 

women’s contributions to the field; understandably, Woolf echoed her friend’s portrayal of 

herself as a unique figure. Later sections of this essay examine arguments advanced by Smyth 



 6 

concerning the different opportunities afforded to aspiring (female) professionals within music 

and literature as well as the obstacles exclusively posed by music criticism. Smyth’s self-

centered feminist writings will be compared with Woolf’s more inclusive offerings in order to 

investigate the junctures at which their inquiries corresponded and diverged, yielding insights 

into the broader relationships between their respective disciplinary standpoints. Woolf’s possible 

motives for not probing the underrepresentation of women in music at greater length in Three 

Guineas (1938) will also be discussed, as this polemical successor to A Room of One’s Own 

sheds additional light upon her intellectual relationship with Smyth.  

 Woolf’s ostensibly dismissive attitude toward Smyth’s writings can be read within the 

wider context of her general opinion of her friend’s literary gifts. Even in Smyth’s earliest 

autobiographical productions, the two-volume Impressions that Remained, Woolf found her to 

be colloquial, frank, and egotistical. Woolf exercised tact when she articulated her thoughts 

publicly in The New Statesman, in which she touched upon Impressions that Remained in the 

course of reviewing Smyth’s second extended literary offering, the miscellany of 

autobiographical episodes titled Streaks of Life.20 But privately she confided to Lytton Strachey, 

“It’s a pity she can’t write; for I don’t suppose one could read it again. But it fascinates me all 

the same.”21 When she came to know Smyth, Woolf’s judgment mellowed a little: Impressions 

that Remained was described as “fascinating,” a “masterpiece,” and even “immortal”—at least 

when she was addressing its author.22 Though her criticisms of Smyth’s drafts could be harsh, 

Woolf persistently encouraged her friend to continue writing autobiography.23 Woolf was so 

delighted that Smyth’s third chronological volume of memoirs, As Time Went On…, had been 

tentatively dedicated to her that she even attempted to persuade the composer to repeat the 

gesture with a subsequent book.24 At the same time, Woolf’s words occasionally call into 



 7 

question just how carefully she paid attention to Smyth’s work. After having known the author 

for nearly a decade, Woolf wrote of rewarding the nighttime hours when she was woken by 

airplanes by reading “Ethel Smyth—Gleams of Memory.”25 That was, of course, not the title of 

one of Smyth’s publications.26  

 Woolf’s attitude toward Smyth’s compositions was colored by a similar sense of 

ambivalence. As noted at the beginning of this essay, in one hastily written letter she rather 

generously described Smyth as the first woman to compose an opera;27 elsewhere Woolf 

expressed indifference toward Smyth’s music and an uncertainty as to her wider place in music 

history. A little under a year after their first meeting, Woolf confided to her diary:  

 

I suspect [Smyth’s] music is too literary—too stressed—too didactic for my taste. 

But I am always impressed by the fact that it is music—I mean that she has spun 

these coherent chords harmonies melodies out of her so practical vigorous, 

strident mind. What if she should be a great composer? This fantastic idea is to 

her the merest commonplace: it is the fabric of her being. As she conducts, she 

hears music like Beethoven’s.28  

 

Woolf’s observations, made after having attended a rehearsal of The Prison, were perceptive. 

Smyth had been trained in the Teutonic traditions of the nineteenth century (Woolf had 

previously noted in her diary that “they say she writes music like an old dryasdust German music 

master”29), and she did aspire to Beethovenian heights. In her formative years, Smyth’s interest 

in music was kindled by her mother and then, more dramatically, by a governess who had 

studied at the Leipzig Conservatory, whose example inspired Smyth to enroll in the same 



 8 

institution in the late 1870s. At the Conservatory, she studied under Carl Reinecke and others, 

before becoming disillusioned and leaving to take lessons with Heinrich von Herzogenberg. She 

settled in Germany for over a decade before circumstances compelled her to return home; during 

that time she became acquainted with some of the country’s most renowned musical personages 

including Brahms, about whom she later wrote at length,30 and Clara Schumann. In Impressions 

that Remained, Smyth was to cite the discovery of Beethoven’s music as a major factor that 

guided her steps toward Germany.31 Beethoven remained one of her favorite composers 

thereafter, and, as Woolf’s words hint, exerted an influence on her music. As Jane Bernstein has 

observed, there are notable similarities between the style and character of Beethoven’s iconic 

Missa Solemnis (1819–23) and Smyth’s own Mass (1891), a large-scale setting of the Ordinary 

that, like Beethoven’s work, is cast in D major.32 Comparisons between the two scores likewise 

permeate the analysis of Smyth’s Mass by Donald Francis Tovey.33  

 Through her study in Germany and her admiration for Beethoven and Brahms, Smyth 

was well versed in the conventions of the musical patriarchy she was to subvert in her own 

output. At the heart of that œuvre lie the operas that Kathleen Abromeit has collectively 

described as “an almost unbelievable accomplishment for a woman composer of the day.”34 

Despite Smyth’s achievement and Woolf’s claim, Smyth’s operas were hardly the first to have 

been composed by a woman. The disjointed history of women writing opera can be traced back 

to the virtual beginnings of the genre in Italy at the turn of the seventeenth century. The first 

female operatic composer is generally acknowledged to have been Francesca Caccini (1587–

?1641), the daughter of Giulio Caccini, whose Euridice (1600–1601) was the first ever published 

opera.35 As Suzanne Cusick has shown through critical reading of the work, Francesca Caccini’s 



 9 

one surviving opera, La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina (1625), may indeed be seen 

to be true to her womanhood.36  

 Francesca Caccini’s precursory example may have been exceptional, but it was by no 

means the only one. Others included Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre (?1665–1729) and 

Maria Theresia von Paradis (1759–1824), neither of whom had been entirely forgotten to music 

history; and as a study by Jacqueline Letzter and Robert Adelson has demonstrated, women such 

as Isabelle de Charrière (1740–1805) had been notably active in the writing of opera in late 

eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France.37 It is highly unlikely that Woolf—or, for that 

matter, Smyth—knew anything about Caccini or any of these precursors; in the absence of 

evidence from primary sources, their awareness of earlier women composers is conjectural at 

best. However, Woolf was by no means wholly ignorant of the field of music, nor of the extent 

of the sexual discrimination within that profession even during her own day. In October 1920, 

nearly a decade before she met Smyth, Woolf had drawn upon her case in an epistolary exchange 

with literary editor Desmond MacCarthy (writing under the pseudonym “Affable Hawk”) in The 

New Statesman, by way of demonstrating the challenges encountered by women who endeavored 

to pursue a musical career.38 If proof be needed that she could cite contemporary woman 

composers other than Smyth, A Room of One’s Own contains a barbed response to critic Cecil 

Gray’s misogynistic comments concerning Les Six member Germaine Tailleferre (1892–1983):  

 

The woman composer stands where the actress stood in the time of Shakespeare. 

Nick Greene . . . said [in Woolf’s fictitious story] that a woman acting put him in 

mind of a dog dancing. [Samuel] Johnson repeated the phrase two hundred years 

later of women preaching. And here, I said, opening a book about music, we have 



 10 

the very words used again [by Cecil Gray] in this year of grace, 1928, of women 

who try to write music. “Of Mlle. Germaine Tailleferre one can only repeat Dr. 

Johnson’s dictum concerning a woman preacher, transposed into terms of music. 

‘Sir, a woman’s composing is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done 

well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.’” So accurately does history 

repeat itself.39  

 

As Peter Jacobs has noted, Woolf received a basic musical education in her childhood, and 

enjoyed listening to music throughout her life.40 She was also distantly related to Vaughan 

Williams, a champion of women composers during his time at the Royal College of Music, 

through his first wife Adeline, a cousin on Woolf’s mother’s side. Woolf’s writings attest that 

opera was a particular preoccupation. She published two essays on the subject in The Times in 

1909;41 and as scholars such as Jane Marcus and Emma Sutton have recently shown, her novels 

reflect a thorough understanding of the plots, structures, and conventions of certain canonical 

works, including Wagnerian music drama (not least Der Ring des Nibelungen) and Mozart’s Die 

Zauberflöte.42 Her knowledge of the former, which is also demonstrated by her two Times 

articles, is especially relevant to the present inquiry given the patent Wagnerian influences 

reflected in Smyth’s early operatic œuvre.  

 Yet the passage of Woolf’s correspondence quoted in the epigraph offers no indication 

that the author was aware that Smyth might have had any antecedents among female opera 

composers. As noted, Smyth’s own writings would have provided Woolf with only a limited idea 

of women’s activity in this field. Although Smyth urged for solidarity among female musicians, 

she generally glossed over the existence of women composers past and present, only mentioning 



 11 

them in passing. In her essay “A Final Burning of Boats” (published in 1928 in the book of the 

same title), for example, there is a brief allusion to Dorothy Howell (1898–1982), in the context 

of her exclusion from the then recently-published third edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music 

and Musicians (1927–28).43 However, Smyth diluted the force of her observation by declining to 

supply any further information about Howell, who, as a woman forty years her junior and at the 

outset of her musical career, had achieved only limited public recognition.44 One reason for 

Smyth’s having mentioned Howell at all lay in the potential for a pointed comparison with a 

male near-namesake, Herbert Howells. Aside from rhetoric, it is unclear why Smyth chose 

Howell as the solitary example of a female composer whom she held to have been wrongly 

omitted from this landmark text. There were certainly others she could have cited in support of 

her arguments. Similarly ambiguous is Smyth’s description of Howell as “composer and 

Professor at the Royal Academy of Music,” which suggests that a case for her inclusion in a 

music dictionary could be made as much on the basis of her teaching as for any other reason.45 

On the basis of Smyth’s words, an uncharitable reader might have been led to suppose that 

Howell was a teacher rather than a composer by profession.  

 One of the most famous female composers of all time, Clara Schumann (1819–96), 

surfaces on a number of different occasions in Smyth’s memoirs, especially when the two 

women became acquainted during Smyth’s time studying in Germany. Yet Smyth’s memoirs 

typically discuss Clara as an acclaimed concert pianist, and as the wife of Robert Schumann and 

mother of his children, without alluding to her compositional activity.46 The sole exception 

occurs in a letter Smyth wrote to her mother in April 1878, quoted in Impressions that Remained:  

 



 12 

I went to Breitkopf and Haertel—the music publishers par excellence in the 

world. The nephew, who conducts the business, Dr. Hase, I know very well and 

he is quite one of the most charming men I ever met. . . . Well, he began by telling 

me that songs had as a rule a bad sale—but that no composeress had ever 

succeeded, barring Frau [Clara] Schumann and Fräulein [Fanny] Mendelssohn, 

whose songs had been published together with those of their husband and brother 

respectively. He told me that a certain Frau [Josephine] Lang had written some 

really very good songs, but they had no sale. I played him mine . . . and he 

expressed himself very willing to take the risk and print them. But would you 

believe it, having listened to all he said about women composers, and considering 

how difficult it is to bargain with an acquaintance, I asked no fee!47  

 

Given Smyth’s tendency to pass over other examples of women composers, this passage 

is particularly fascinating for its mention not just of Clara Schumann’s creative musical 

endeavors but also those of Fanny Mendelssohn (1805–47) and Josephine Lang (1815–80). What 

is most telling about this allusion to a total of three antecedents is that it occurs not in the 

autobiographical narrative itself, but in the correspondence that she was wont to reproduce 

wholesale in dedicated sections of her volumes. Though her contemporary personal documents 

did at least acknowledge the compositional activities of women aside from herself, the story that 

she recounted retrospectively for publication painted a somewhat different picture.48 

Nonetheless, in this instance, the fact of Smyth’s having several precursors is presented as 

actually inhibiting her as she sought to publish her own music. The representative of Breitkopf & 

Härtel with whom she spoke, Dr. Hase, noted that the reason the songs of Fanny Mendelssohn 



 13 

and Clara Schumann had entered into print was that they appeared in the same volume as those 

of celebrated male composers to whom they were related.49 That was obviously an option 

unavailable to Smyth. Moreover, the lack of commercial success of Josephine Lang’s published 

music is couched as a precedent that was potentially harmful to her. Subsequent history suggests 

that this assessment was not necessarily accurate: in 1882, just four years after Smyth’s visit to 

their offices, Breitkopf & Härtel were to issue a posthumous collection of forty songs by Lang. 

This fact alone provides an indication as to whether such a venture would have been considered 

commercially viable. Taking Smyth’s account at face value, however, the publisher’s 

representative ranked highly those of Lang’s songs that had appeared in print by 1878; the 

inescapable implication of his words—notwithstanding the point that songs generally sold 

poorly—is that their failure to attract buyers may have been connected to the composer’s gender. 

Having heard Dr. Hase’s comments on the risk involved in publishing the music of women 

composers, Smyth felt unable to bargain for a fee for her music, and so lost out financially as 

well.  

 In the whole of Smyth’s literary output, as noted, only one female composer received 

extensive discussion. Augusta Holmès was the subject of a dedicated essay (originally written in 

July 1921) in A Final Burning of Boats, which provided a sketch of her character, an evaluation 

of her music, and an account of Smyth’s visits to her in 1900 and 1902, the first of which was 

later retold in What Happened Next.50 It is these sections of Smyth’s writings, if any, that would 

have alerted Woolf that Smyth was not the first woman ever to have written an opera. Holmès 

was over ten years older than Smyth, and her four operas were all completed by 1884, roughly a 

decade before Smyth had written her first.51 Though only Holmès’s La montagne noire was 

actually performed, she had at least brought an opera to the stage in advance of Smyth, whose 



 14 

Fantasio was premiered in Weimar in 1898, three years after Holmès’s work had been received 

(coolly) at the Paris Opéra. But despite writing about Holmès at such length, Smyth did not 

always appear well disposed toward her. The portrait she painted of her senior contemporary is 

hardly a flattering one; Holmès, at that time middle aged and ailing, is introduced in What 

Happened Next as “a convalescent arrayed in a red flannel dressing-gown . . . short and fat, her 

red hair powdered white . . . and her white face, helped out with black, red, and white, vigorously 

and wildly applied, as by one who could not be bothered to use a looking-glass and preferred 

doing her face ‘by heart.’”52 And, though Smyth enjoyed and even promoted some of her music, 

her description of her as “the nearest approach to a large-scale woman composer that the world 

had yet seen” could reasonably be construed as dismissive.53 Her views on La montagne noire, 

meanwhile, left little doubt as to exactly how highly she rated her senior contemporary as a 

composer of opera:  

 

much of the music was student’s work. But, child though she must have been 

when most of it was written, she invariably rose to the big situations, and given 

her strong dramatic instinct and the pages upon pages of warm, beautiful, 

melodious music in it, a second opera from her pen might have been a 

masterpiece. But it was never to be written.54 

 

Putting aside her pointed comments about the putative immaturity of La montagne noire, 

both this and other of Smyth’s observations led the reader to believe that it was Holmès’s first 

and only opera. But Smyth, who had met Holmès on two separate occasions and knew much 

about her both by reputation and from mutual friends, would surely have been aware that this 



 15 

was not the case. Even more startling is her disparaging remark “Of her opera I only heard a part; 

but knowing what I do about the difficulties of opera composers, especially plus the handicap of 

sex, the astonishing fact about it was that it existed at all.”55 In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf 

reproached Cecil Gray for making a similar pronouncement about Germaine Tailleferre, and the 

similarity of Smyth’s assessment to that of Gray illuminates her attitude toward Holmès. Having 

read A Final Burning of Boats,56 Woolf would have disapproved of Smyth’s evaluation; this may 

provide a reason why it is the one of the least discussed of Smyth’s volumes in their entire 

correspondence.  

 Even more revealing is the shift in Smyth’s presentation of the nature of her relationship 

to Holmès between her earlier article and Holmès’s appearance in What Happened Next some 

two decades later. In A Final Burning of Boats, Smyth had identified that she had sought her 

initial meeting with Holmès on the grounds that she was “a fellow-struggler in the thicket of 

opera”; the pretext for her second visit was provided by Smyth’s desire to talk about her opera 

Der Wald, which was then being staged in London.57 Smyth’s implication was that Holmès was 

a “fellow-struggler” not just because they were both opera composers, but also because they 

were both women who had endured hardship in the course of securing stage productions of their 

works.58 In contrast, Smyth’s subsequent account of their meeting in What Happened Next 

included a codetta absent from the original: “When we parted after three hours’ ardent 

conversation, we embraced with fervour. I . . . felt we really were friends. Just at the end [of the 

meeting] there was a touch of symposium; ‘Adieu chère collègue,’ she said—a remark I 

pretended not to hear.”59 Why was it so important to Smyth to be seen as ignoring Holmès’s 

parting words? By her own admission, the two women had enjoyed an amiable conversation. Her 

earlier essay had been titled “Augusta Holmès, Pioneer” (ironically, using the exact same term 



 16 

with which Woolf would describe Smyth ten years later in a speech to be quoted presently). But 

why should somebody Smyth deemed to be a “fellow-struggler” in 1921 not also be considered 

her colleague in 1940? Just as she seems to have shifted her ground on other women composers 

between her correspondence written in the late 1870s and Impressions that Remained, Smyth 

ultimately appears to have chosen not to regard Holmès as an ally in her crusade to overcome 

prejudice within the male-dominated music profession.60 As with Josephine Lang, the fact of 

Smyth’s having encountered another instance of a woman who had turned her attentions toward 

music composition—and even, in Holmès’s case, the writing of opera—was at best a 

coincidence, and at worst a hindrance.  

 Smyth’s writings often retail the discrimination she experienced as a woman composer, 

and how she and her work suffered at the hands of the coterie of power-wielding decision-

makers to whom she collectively referred as the Inner Circle, the Group, the Elders, or the 

Machine. In view of the strength of her feeling that the musical patriarchy was conspiring against 

her, Smyth’s apparently prejudicial attitude toward fellow female composers might seem 

paradoxical. Yet, if the words Woolf quoted from Cecil Gray were any reflection of prevailing 

male opinion of women composers, it is unsurprising that Smyth took measures to distance 

herself from other examples of “women who try to write music” (to borrow Woolf’s 

description), and hence from the stigma that came with being bracketed in that denigrated 

category. She did not want to be seen as a vamp like Holmès or a salon composer like Lang. 

Smyth insisted on being evaluated on her own terms as equal to men; she did not want feminine 

allies who would have been considered weak. She viewed herself only as the precursor of “a 

future chain of great women composers.”61 It appears likely that she isolated herself from female 

counterparts in an attempt to insinuate herself into the otherwise masculine domain of musical 



 17 

canon. This strategy succeeded to a remarkable extent. While she lamented that “the public . . . 

mildly says from time to time: ‘Strange that there are no great women composers!,’”62 her own 

writings contributed little to addressing this imbalance lest it affect the status of her own music. 

Who can blame her? 

 Woolf perpetuated Smyth’s self-portrait as a unique phenomenon distinct from any 

previous female composers. At the event that was to be the pinnacle of their relationship, their 

joint presentation at the meeting of the London/National Society for Women’s Service on 21 

January 1931 on the subject of “Music and Literature,” Woolf paid homage to her friend as being 

“of the race of pioneers, of pathmakers . . . [who] has gone before and felled trees and blasted 

rocks and built bridges and thus made a way for those who come after her.”63 Woolf held that her 

own profession was the only one that had been available to women of earlier periods, in stark 

contrast to disciplines such as music and the visual arts. In Three Guineas, which had its origins 

in this speech, she wrote:  

 

the profession of literature, to give it a simple name, is the only profession which 

did not fight a series of battles in the nineteenth century. . . . We cannot debar 

women from the use of libraries; or forbid them to buy ink and paper; or rule that 

metaphors shall only be used by one sex, as the male only in art schools was 

allowed to study from the nude; or rule that rhyme shall be used by one sex only 

as the male only in Academies of music was allowed to play in orchestras.64  

 

Smyth confirmed Woolf’s perception of the differences between their respective 

professions in terms of the possibilities they held for women. Her writings repeatedly express the 



 18 

opinion that the difficulties experienced by women in music were far greater than in the other 

creative arts. She drew specific comparison between music and literature, notably in her 

polemical essay “Female Pipings in Eden” (1933, from the volume of the same title), which 

included a chapter dedicated to the topic.65 Smyth’s embrace of this reasoning is understandable 

to the extent that her literary output may be regarded as self-serving. She knew well that she had 

a broader audience for her books than for her scores, and sought to stimulate public interest in 

her music through literary writings that were both entertaining and polemical.66 Nonetheless, her 

activities within both spheres—her first and second “strings”—meant that she was well qualified 

to comment upon the differences between them. Her arguments rest on such firm foundations 

that they cannot be dismissed merely on the grounds of authorial agenda. She held that it was 

eminently possible to teach oneself how to write literature, by reading privately, observing life, 

and recounting one’s experiences to friends; hence in earlier periods of history, “nobody could 

prevent women from writing novels on the sly.”67 To Smyth’s mind, the book trade was 

“divinely simple”: printing was comparatively cheap, hence publication carried limited financial 

risk; the sole mediator between author and public was the publisher; there was much more scope 

for books and authors to coexist amicably; and even if a particular novel did not find favor with 

the critics, members of the public could easily buy their own copies and decide for themselves. 

By baleful contrast, engraving music was expensive; performances of large-scale works could 

not be mounted without the mediation of publishers or copyists to reproduce the parts; 

conductors and their associated committees were primarily interested in performing the “old 

favourites” of the repertory, for fear of losing audiences and the financial support provided if 

they did not; and any new works that somehow found their way to the concert hall were often 

relegated to oblivion after a single performance. Given these obstacles, and the consequently 



 19 

limited room for contemporary composers in concert programs, Smyth contended that it was 

unsurprising that the musical establishment was governed by favoritism, string-pulling, and male 

solidarity. Her observations may be reinterpreted as reflecting the reality that there was 

significantly more space available for women within literary canons than those of music, where 

hegemonic rankings were therefore more tightly enforced.  

 Smyth’s point about the significance of critical opinion, meanwhile, was addressed more 

fully in another essay in the same volume, “Where Musical Criticism Goes Astray.”68 There she 

argued that anybody could repeatedly read a poem, view a painting, or even attend a play 

(typically given as a series of performances), but that public opinion on a new musical work—

presentations of which were few and far between—lay to large extent in the soiled hands of the 

press. Smyth held that music critics were faced with a thorny task in that they were required to 

judge a given score on a single hearing. Further, they had to evaluate a new work on the basis of 

a performance that could be seriously flawed, without knowing whether the blame for any 

perceived faults lay with its composer or with an insensitive conductor, limited rehearsal time, or 

even the absence of necessary instruments. She cited a number of instances in recent music 

history in which the initial criticism had been negative of pieces subsequently recognized as 

masterpieces. Smyth believed that the press could never kill off a work that is “really alive,” yet 

her view was that a dismissive critique might nevertheless “induce a state of suspended 

animation which may last longer than the life of the unfortunate composer.”69  

 Reading the output of Smyth and Woolf in tandem inevitably leads to speculations as to 

whether there was an element of competition between them, with their various writings 

implicitly responding to one another.70 Many of the views presented thus far are drawn from the 

intellectual fruits of their friendship: speeches they delivered on a shared platform; the literature 



 20 

that resulted from them; and essays passed from one to the other for comment prior to 

publication.71 A certain amount of tension did exist between the two women, even despite—or 

perhaps, precisely because of—their belonging to different eras, artistic disciplines, and 

sociopolitical backgrounds. If Smyth’s chapter in “Female Pipings in Eden” was intended to 

demonstrate how much more problematic the path to professional success was for a woman in 

music than in literature, then one of her principal comparators for the latter field was Woolf 

herself. An early draft of “Female Pipings in Eden” included references to Woolf, which so 

displeased the novelist that she recommended that Smyth remove them. Woolf went so far as to 

annotate Smyth’s manuscript to show how the offending text could be modified.72 Smyth looks 

to have complied, insofar as Woolf’s name does not appear in the published version. Conversely, 

Woolf initially seemed to concede the point in her speech to the London/National Society for 

Women’s Service. Woolf admits that the story of how she became a successful author of 

literature was “very tame” compared with that of Smyth in music.73 As her own history unfolds 

over the course of the speech, however, it becomes clear that the pursuit of her own career was 

not as untroubled as her words at first suggest, and her ironic claims of tameness merely serve to 

reinforce the harsh reality of the plight of the professional woman in the Edwardian era.  

 This disparity between the perspectives articulated by the two women was surely the 

result of their distinct disciplinary positions. It was most telling when both drew upon the same 

piece of evidence to illustrate different points. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf recounted the 

tale of Jane Austen’s hiding her manuscripts so that her visitors would not see her work; the 

anecdote was provided as evidence of the extreme measures that one nineteenth-century woman 

was compelled to take in order to write a novel, given the need for discretion even within the 

supposed sanctity of her own home.74 When Smyth alluded to the same story in “A Final 



 21 

Burning of Boats” (which had been published in the year prior to A Room of One’s Own), it was 

to demonstrate that “On certain fields the battle is won” :75 she sought to show that it was at least 

possible for a woman to become a published novelist at a time during which she could not have 

been, say, a composer. Smyth’s words resonate strongly with those of Woolf in the extract from 

Three Guineas quoted above, in which she discussed the absence from literature of the sex-

oriented “battles” found in other disciplines; and it was by no means the only juncture at which 

the two writers seemed independently to be advancing opinions that, though serving different 

purposes, ran very much along the same lines.  

One of the clearest examples of this congruity has its origins in A Room of One’s Own, in 

which Woolf stated, with reference to Coleridge’s renowned view of the androgyny of the “great 

mind”:76  

 

it is natural for the sexes to co-operate. . . . The normal and comfortable state of 

being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating. If 

one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also 

must have intercourse with the man in her. . . . It is fatal to be a man or woman 

pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.77  

 

A Room of One’s Own had indirectly precipitated Smyth’s initial meeting with Woolf, having 

interested her sufficiently to lead her to seek out its author. Given her engagement with the 

volume, it is hardly unexpected that Smyth was to write in an analogous manner just a few years 

later in “Female Pipings in Eden”: “Art is bi-sexual, the female element implicit with the 

male.”78 Where Woolf’s subject had been the writer’s necessity to draw on elements of the 



 22 

opposing sex, Smyth’s observation touched upon the continuing exclusion of women from 

certain professional orchestras and the fresh perspectives that their admission within others had 

brought to music performance. Nonetheless, both women held that the ideal state for art would 

be one that combined both male and female aspects, and that the presence of women—whether 

creating original works or providing new interpretations of existing art—enriched their 

respective disciplines. Smyth made the link between the two fields explicit; elsewhere in the 

same essay she wrote: “Few deny that the Brontës and Jane Austen brought a new note into our 

literature. Why then should not our musical contribution be equally individual and pregnant?”79  

 However, whereas Woolf had written in A Room of One’s Own that “a woman writing 

thinks back through her mothers,”80 Smyth elected not to follow her friend’s example. Woolf 

repeatedly paid tribute to literary women in history, including Aphra Behn, Fanny Burney, Jane 

Austen, the Brontës, and George Eliot, but, as discussed above, Smyth was disconcertingly quiet 

about her female precursors. As Woolf noted, history offered no traditions of women in music 

that were truly comparable to those in literature;81 at the same time, Smyth eschewed some 

valuable opportunities to raise public awareness of those women composers who had achieved 

recognition. Even her earliest biographer, Christopher St John, conceded, “It is a mistake . . . to 

assume that there never had been any women composers before Ethel Smyth.”82 As her memoirs 

attest, Smyth knew of Fanny Mendelssohn, Josephine Lang, Clara Schumann, and Augusta 

Holmès, to which list we might add Germaine Tailleferre, if only on the basis of Smyth’s reading 

of A Room of One’s Own. It seems highly likely that she had also encountered the music of 

Louise Reichardt (1779–1826) during her time in Germany, as Reichardt’s songs, which had 

been published in the early decades of the 1800s, retained their popularity throughout the 

century.  



 23 

Moreover, Smyth could not have avoided taking notice—perhaps even with envy—of the 

successful women composers active in Britain during her lifetime, including Maude Valérie 

White (1855–1937) and Liza Lehmann (1862–1918).83 Through her early involvement with the 

Society of Women Musicians, which was founded in 1911, Smyth must have encountered both 

Lehmann (its inaugural president) and White, together with other acclaimed female composers 

such as Cécile Chaminade (1857–1944) and Rebecca Clarke (1886–1979).84 White’s 

autobiographical writings include a story of Smyth visiting her cottage at Taormina, presumably 

in 1903 during the tour of Sicily recounted in What Happened Next.85 Smyth, conversely, 

omitted any reference to White’s hospitality. Elsewhere, Smyth had crossed paths with another 

contemporary, Adela Maddison (1866–1929), whose orchestral Irische Ballade (1909, now lost) 

she offered to convey to the composer Frederick Delius with the aim of securing its 

performance.86  

 Notwithstanding the manifold unchronicled encounters that Smyth must have had with 

other women composers and their music over the course of her long and busy career, a number 

of noteworthy connections can be easily drawn between her and some of the very same figures 

she neglected to mention in her prose. As evidence, Smyth’s discussion of exclusions in the third 

edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians once again becomes relevant here. Most 

of the women composers cited in the previous paragraphs were included in this edition of the 

monumental dictionary, though many were given short shrift. Maddison, however, continued to 

be omitted, and since Smyth had helped to promote her on at least one previous occasion, it is 

curious that Smyth did not seek to put forward her case in this instance too; perhaps she felt more 

sufficiently distanced from Dorothy Howell, who was some two generations younger.87 

Whatever the reason, rather than recognize and promote her rivals in her literature, Smyth wrote 



 24 

self-serving polemics on the plight of the woman composer that were mere adjuncts to her 

autobiographies. In lieu of citing contemporaries, Smyth provided an extraordinary “origin 

myth” for women in music, reaching back to the origins of Woman herself according to biblical 

legend. The Garden of Eden story that frames Smyth’s most fiercely feminist essay, and from 

which she derived its title,88 is on the face of it chillingly simple: when Eve first took a reed to 

her lips and started to play, Adam’s reaction was hostile to say the least. In Smyth’s tale, music 

thereafter became an overwhelmingly male-dominated domain, in which women were silenced 

and from which they were excluded at every opportunity and by every means available.89  

 Jane Marcus has observed that “Female Pipings in Eden does for women in music what 

Virginia Woolf did for women in literature; it gives women artists a myth of their own creative 

origins and urges them to struggle for possession of the past in order to forge the future.”90 If 

Smyth’s feminist writings can be regarded as musical counterparts to Woolf’s own, then the 

nature of the general relationship between them, in terms of the scope of their coverage, also 

warrants further exploration. Although Smyth alluded to topics as diverse as literature, the visual 

arts, politics, and even science in the course of her tirades, her attentions were always focused 

narrowly on the field of music, usually on herself and her experiences as a composer. One 

passage of “Female Pipings in Eden” unabashedly proclaimed her self-referential approach:  

 

If you have reached a mature age, and are still more or less in possession of your 

faculties, people have had time to find you out, and will know whether or no[t] a 

study like this is born of lack of balance, non-perception of the other side of a 

question, disregard for truth, ill temper, inflamed egotism, or vindictiveness . . . 

One hopes to be acquitted of these things, but Lord! what does it matter?91  



 25 

 

By contrast, Woolf endeavored to incorporate discussion of women’s situation in more general 

terms across the social, political, and professional spectrums rather than to concentrate on her 

own sphere of activity. Woolf’s diversity meant that her broad and humane connections between 

various other disciplines precluded the focus evinced by Smyth. To use the terms set forth by 

Isaiah Berlin, Woolf was a fox, knowing many things, whereas Smyth (for all her multifarious 

activities) was a hedgehog who knew one big thing: herself.92 Woolf seemed to acknowledge 

that music was Smyth’s field, and that the composer should be the one to write about it. Toward 

the end of her life, she suggested that Smyth write a “Common Reader review of music,”93 

presumably one fashioned after her own literary example.94 Ten years earlier, having read 

Smyth’s short article “Composers and Critics,”95 Woolf had written, “What I should like would 

be, in another article, a purely objective statement of the exact disabilities (not being allowed to 

play in orchestras etc which women suffer in music.).”96 Without her deference to Smyth on 

musical topics, Woolf might have undertaken this task herself; as we shall see momentarily, she 

briefly considered doing so. But Woolf was aware that music was not her area of expertise. In a 

different context she once remarked to Smyth, “As well [to] ask a deaf donkey to criticise 

Mozart.”97  

 Woolf did indeed shy away from detailed consideration of music per se in her feminist 

literature. However, her reticence was not simply due to her perception that there was little she 

could usefully add to Smyth’s previously published critiques, or to her having little desire to 

expand into her touchy friend’s territory. In the course of writing Three Guineas, Woolf sent 

Smyth a request for information on the opportunities denied to women in music:  

 



 26 

Information wanted: Are women allowed to play in orchestras? When was this, 

allowed, if so: and are they now musically, (as far as training goes) equal with the 

other sex? I’ve now got to produce, in the usual fury and despair and haste, what 

should have been a booklet, and has swollen to a book, in which this fact, or 

fiction, occurs, and I want it to be accurate, but have lost my note, so appeal to 

you.98  

 

Though Smyth did not address these questions exhaustively in “Female Pipings in Eden,” Woolf 

would nonetheless have found there many answers to her queries. Smyth discussed at some 

length the musical training and orchestral opportunities available to women, notably that some of 

the major orchestras had tentatively opened their doors to female players (around the time of the 

First World War), but many had since endeavored to exclude them again.99 It is even conceivable 

that the lost note to which Woolf referred in her letter had been taken from “Female Pipings in 

Eden,” which had recently fascinated her.100 Otherwise, it seems curious that Woolf waited so 

long to initiate this discussion, given that Smyth was the obvious person for her to approach.  

 Whatever the reason for this eleventh-hour solicitation of information, and whether or not 

a reply was forthcoming from Smyth,101 Woolf ultimately included in Three Guineas few 

notable references to music. The first occurs toward the end of the opening chapter, in a passage 

contending that the only real profession available to the “educated man’s daughter” (to use 

Woolf’s frequently repeated formulation) was marriage itself:  

 

It was with a view to marriage that [a woman’s] mind was taught. It was with a 

view to marriage that she tinkled on the piano, but was not allowed to join an 



 27 

orchestra; sketched innocent domestic scenes, but was not allowed to study from 

the nude; read this book, but was not allowed to read that, charmed, and talked.102  

 

Two further allusions to music, both found in Woolf’s concluding third chapter, are also worthy 

of mention. One has already been quoted; the other occurs in the course of discussing the 

activities that nineteenth-century daughters might have pursued were it not for their fathers 

preventing them from doing so: “Some wanted to learn music, not to tinkle domestic airs, but to 

compose—operas, symphonies, quartets. Others wanted to paint, not ivy-clad cottages, but naked 

bodies.”103 These three passages may clearly be read as echoes of one another, not least because 

they all place the practice of forbidding women from painting the nude side by side with that of 

prohibiting them from joining orchestras;104 in one passage, they are presented as being general 

policies of schools of art and music respectively. Woolf’s consistent grouping of music with 

other disciplines, particularly the visual arts, suggests a reluctance to consider this field purely on 

its own. This pattern is confirmed by several additional passing references to music in Three 

Guineas that are too inconsequential to warrant specific examination here.105 Another of Woolf’s 

recurring themes is that the one form of music-making that was socially acceptable for a woman 

was that of desultory domestic piano-playing. The image invites comparison with the character 

Rachel Vinrace, the music-loving protagonist of Woolf’s first published novel, The Voyage Out, 

who had attained a high standard on the instrument by early adulthood.106 At one point in Three 

Guineas, the pastime is explicitly identified as a way of entrancing marriage prospects, for a 

woman who was seen as an “accomplished” pianist could indeed attract suitors with her fetching 

talent; as William Weber has noted, to be presented in salon performance with the aim of 

obtaining a spouse was a common practice in the nineteenth century.107  



 28 

 What, exactly, lay in Woolf’s mind as she wrote these passages about music in Three 

Guineas? Rachel Vinrace aside, the picture that Woolf painted of the unmarried woman idly 

tinkling on a cottage piano doubtless had its origins in the novels of Jane Austen that she so 

adored,108 with their plethora of heroines for whom—like the author herself—the instrument was 

an important part of their lives: Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility; Elizabeth and 

Mary Bennet in Pride and Prejudice; Jane Fairfax and Emma Woodhouse in Emma; Anne Elliot 

in Persuasion.109 Reading between the lines, however, the figure who emerges most strongly 

from the discussions of music in Three Guineas is Smyth herself. Whereas “Female Pipings in 

Eden” had previously indicated that the issue of women’s exclusion from orchestras was rather 

more complex than Woolf’s treatment suggested, Smyth’s essay nonetheless appears to have 

exerted significant influence on her friend. The emphasis that Woolf placed on the orchestral 

scene, and on the formal training available to women in conservatories (as against, for instance, 

exploring the current status of women as singers, music teachers, or composers), bears traces of 

having absorbed the very elements around which Smyth’s discussion had crystalized in “Female 

Pipings in Eden,” especially the second chapter, “Women’s Training Hitherto.”110 Moreover, 

Smyth had quite literally overcome the opposition of her father, an upper middle-class army 

general, in order to have a career in music at all. Her memoirs relate that there had never been 

great sympathy between them.111 He reportedly considered his young daughter’s ideas of 

studying music in Leipzig to be nonsensical; he despised her early harmony tutor, Alexander 

Ewing, for his role in educating her. In consequence, the daughter became increasingly 

disobedient, secretly borrowing money and traveling to London unchaperoned to attend concerts. 

Her behavior became so ungovernable that she and her father soon clashed on a daily basis: she 

refused to attend church; she declined to sing at family dinner parties; and she even completely 



 29 

stopped speaking to people. Ultimately, her father had no option but to consent reluctantly to his 

daughter’s plans.  

 Woolf would also have appreciated that Smyth determinedly pursued a professional 

career in music rather than marriage. Quite aside from the issue of her sexuality, Smyth indicated 

that the nature of her artistic activities ruled out matrimony. In Impressions that Remained, she 

wrote pointedly, “Where should be found the man whose existence could blend with mine 

without loss of quality on either side? . . . My work must, and would always, be the first 

consideration.”112 Most importantly, in Woolf’s eyes, Smyth was that pioneering woman who 

strove to compose operas, symphonies, and quartets, rather than consign herself to the light-

hearted piano airs that contemporary society deemed to be appropriate for women. Although 

Smyth never saw to completion her early sortie into the realm of the symphony (unless The 

Prison, from its subtitle, is to be regarded as such), she did write several string quartets, in 

addition to the six magnum opuses whose existence led Woolf to refer to her as “the first woman 

to write an opera.” If Woolf’s words are no more than the result of lack of historical knowledge 

or an authorial slip, then Smyth’s self-centeredness would go far to account for it. But if those 

words are to be interpreted along the lines proposed earlier in this essay, then there is clearly a 

further reason why Woolf held that Smyth’s operas represented genuine “women’s work” in the 

way that her autobiographies did not. By resisting the strictures of the patriarchal music 

establishment as well as the crushing burden of history, Smyth may have made an authentic and 

focused contribution to the self-representation of women through her operas that was far more 

powerful than the diffuse narcissism of her literary writings.  

 Within this context, Woolf’s statement that “there’s never been a woman[’]s 

autobiography” must be examined in greater detail. Woolf’s use of the term “autobiography” 



 30 

implies that she did not view anything in her own output as such, to say nothing of many broadly 

analogous writings by a wide range of other female authors. Given that modern critics have 

turned to documents such as correspondence, diaries, autobiographical fragments, and fictional 

discourses as faithful records of women’s self-narration,113 Woolf seems to have unwittingly 

adopted a disconcertingly patriarchal view by discounting these sources in favor of fully fledged 

published autobiographies, such as Cardinal Newman’s seven-part Apologia pro vita sua.114 She 

even remarked upon the absence of a female counterpart to Rousseau, whose Confessions is 

commonly considered to be the “father” of modern autobiography.115 Yet she was aware that by 

writing a letter, the author gave “back a reflection of the other person.”116 Surely, the document 

discussed here is no exception. Given my arguments that Woolf held Smyth’s texts to have been 

written according to masculine autobiographical paradigms, as epitomized by her jarring egotism 

and especially her persistent recourse to the bruising, patriarchal “I,” it is no surprise that 

Woolf’s objections to these practices are particularly pronounced in the case of “Female Pipings 

in Eden,” in which Smyth’s voice is heard at its most strident. Woolf commented upon an early 

draft of this polemic that  

 

as you will guess what I criticise is what you say to be necessary—that is the 

autobiography. I hate it. I dont think it adds any thing to what you have said. I 

think the personal details immensely diminish the power of the rest. Because one 

feels—but I wont go on; for I am aware that I may be prejudiced. I hate any writer 

to talk about himself. . . . I hate personal snippets more and more. And the 

mention of “I” is so potent—such a drug, such a deep violet stain—that one in a 

page is enough to colour a chapter. . . .  



 31 

. . . give all the facts and all the dates; the more the better; but let them be about 

other people, not E[thel] S[myth]. My own longing in reading your article is to 

escape the individual; and to be told simply, plainly, objectively. . . . You will say 

Oh but I must cite my case because there is no other. But my dear Ethel your case 

is that there are a thousand others. Leave your own case out of it; theirs will be far 

far stronger. Enough, I only say this because—well, I didnt write “A room” [i.e. A 

Room of One’s Own] without considerable feeling even you will admit; I’m not 

cool on the subject. And I forced myself to keep my own figure fictitious; 

legendary. If I had said, Look here am I uneducated, because my brothers used all 

the family funds which is the fact—Well theyd have said; she has an axe to grind; 

and no one would have taken me seriously . . .117 

 

The genre of unashamed first-person autobiography was clearly anathema to Woolf, but it was 

nevertheless one into which she had ventured and failed. Her deeply personal memoir “A Sketch 

of the Past”—which, significantly, included some intimate details about her own sexual 

history—was abandoned in November 1940, just one month prior to writing the letter quoted in 

the epigraph of this essay.118 Could Woolf’s inability to come to terms with the genre of the 

memoir provide an explanation why she continued to encourage Smyth’s idiosyncratic brand of 

literature, even as she castigated its egocentricity and inferior writing? Did she recognize that 

Smyth, for all her literary flaws, was nevertheless capable of producing an androgynous text that, 

though it adhered to the patriarchal model of conventional autobiography, remained stubbornly 

faithful to the author’s gender? Was the purpose of that letter, written on the eve of what was to 

be her final Christmas, an invitation to her friend to take up the challenge where she had left off? 



 32 

If so, were her words “I leave it to you” in reference to more than the effects of the cold winter 

morning on her pen?  

 Writing of the dynamic interaction between these two extraordinary artists, Hermione 

Lee has remarked, “Ethel’s monomania and narcissism felt to Virginia like a grotesque parody of 

her own self-absorption.”119 It is deeply ironic, for instance, that Woolf used A Room of One’s 

Own to explain to Smyth why “Female Pipings in Eden” should not merely recount the author’s 

own case—thereby drawing on the example of herself while simultaneously counseling Smyth to 

refrain from this same practice. In view of the considerable synergy between the opinions 

advanced by the two writers, it may have become apparent to Woolf that the self-centered Smyth 

was too similar to her for comfort. For Woolf, the safest course was to skate quickly over 

musical subjects, for otherwise Smyth’s egotism might have been too readily recognizable in her 

own feminist critiques. On the other hand, Smyth did not concern herself with such scruples. As 

indicated earlier in this essay, she referred to her literary activity as “a second string whereon to 

play, as well as one can, the tune life is always making up in one’s heart.”120 It would seem, 

however, that Woolf’s evasion of music—the very area that was the focus of Smyth’s life and 

prose—might have served a wider purpose than merely allowing her friend the space to play that 

particular tune unaccompanied.  

 

 

Notes 

 

 



 33 

 

  Christopher Wiley is Senior Lecturer in Music and Director of Undergraduate Studies at City 

University London, UK. He is the author of articles appearing in Music and Letters, 

Comparative Criticism, Biography, and Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, as well as 

book chapters on subjects as wide-ranging as Haydn, Michael Jackson, and Buffy the 

Vampire Slayer. His doctoral dissertation, Re-writing Composers’ Lives: Critical 

Historiography and Musical Biography, undertaken at the University of London, provides a 

critical examination of musical biography through comparative studies of texts on several 

canonical composers. He is currently preparing a monograph on the earliest volumes of the 

celebrated “Master Musicians” series (1899–1906). Other research interests include music 

and gender studies, popular music studies, and music for television.  

 This essay originated in a paper delivered at The Fourteenth Annual International Conference 

on Virginia Woolf, “Back to Bloomsbury,” Institute of English Studies, University of 

London, UK, 24 June 2004, which in turn developed from an earlier study of Ethel Smyth 

and Virginia Woolf (see note 9 below). I wish to thank Irene Zedlacher and the editors and 

anonymous readers at The Musical Quarterly for their generous and insightful input.  

1  Virginia Woolf to Ethel Smyth, 24 December 1940, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. 

Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, 6 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1975–80) [henceforth 

Letters], 6:453. In referencing personal documents, I follow the dating suggested by the 

editors (though rendering the dates themselves in a standardized form) and, when quoting, I 

adhere to the spelling and punctuation of the original.  

 



 34 

 

2  A comprehensive list of Smyth’s works, compiled by Jory Bennett, is found in The Memoirs 

of Ethel Smyth, ed. Ronald Crichton (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Viking, 1987), 373–81.  

3  Elizabeth Wood has recently provided a detailed analytical account of Smyth’s deafness, its 

onset, and its implications for her later compositional career, in her article “On Deafness and 

Musical Creativity: The Case of Ethel Smyth,” Musical Quarterly 92, nos. 1–2 (Spring–

Summer 2009): 33–69.  

4  Ethel Smyth, What Happened Next (London: Longmans, 1940), 2. Elsewhere in her literary 

texts, Smyth had similarly developed the metaphor of her music and her writing being, 

respectively, her first and second “strings.”  

5  Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader: First Series (London: Hogarth, 1925); A Room of 

One’s Own (London: Hogarth, 1929). For the record, Woolf’s novels (all published by 

Hogarth Press of London, which she owned jointly with her husband Leonard, unless 

otherwise stated) are as follows: The Voyage Out (London: Duckworth, 1915), Night and Day 

(London: Duckworth, 1919), Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse 

(1927), Orlando: A Biography (1928), The Waves (1931), The Years (1937), and Between the 

Acts (1941); her other major publications include Flush: A Biography (1933), Three Guineas 

(1938), and Roger Fry: A Biography (1940).  

6  See, for instance, Linda Anderson’s discussion in “Virginia Woolf: ‘In the Shadow of the 

Letter “I,”’” in her Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century: Remembered 

Futures (Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1997), 42–75, at 46–47.  

7  See Woolf to Smyth, 9 July 1940, in Letters, 6:403–04.  

 



 35 

 

8  Smyth’s four volumes of chronological autobiography, which recount the first fifty years of 

her life, are Impressions that Remained: Memoirs, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1919); As 

Time Went On… (London: Longmans, 1936); and What Happened Next; a further volume, A 

Fresh Start, was unfinished at her death in 1944. Her other book publications are: Streaks of 

Life (London: Longmans, 1921, 2/1924); A Three-Legged Tour in Greece (London: 

Heinemann, 1927); A Final Burning of Boats etc. (London: Longmans, 1928); Female 

Pipings in Eden ([London]: Peter Davies, 1933, 2/1934); Beecham and Pharaoh (London: 

Chapman & Hall, 1935); Inordinate (?) Affection: A Story for Dog Lovers (London: Cresset, 

1936); and Maurice Baring (London: Heinemann, 1938).  

9  For a more comprehensive explanation of some of the arguments summarized in the next two 

paragraphs, see Christopher Wiley, “‘When a woman speaks the truth about her body’: Ethel 

Smyth, Virginia Woolf, and the Challenges of Lesbian Auto/biography,” Music and Letters 

85, no. 3 (August 2004): 388–414; inevitably, in expanding its themes, a small amount of 

material drawn from this earlier article is reworked in the present essay.  

10  See Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 150.  

11  Suzanne Raitt, “‘The tide of Ethel’: Femininity as Narrative in the Friendship of Ethel Smyth 

and Virginia Woolf,” Critical Quarterly 30, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 3–21, at 14.  

12  Like many lesbian-identified women, Smyth’s sexuality was complex, not least owing to her 

long-standing relationship with the writer and philosopher Henry Brewster, which has 

recently been subjected to renewed scholarly scrutiny by Amanda Harris in “The Smyth–

Brewster Correspondence: A Fresh Look at the Hidden Romantic World of Ethel Smyth,” 

 



 36 

 

Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 14 (2010): 72–94. Nonetheless, I follow 

the lead of a range of modern lesbian theory in considering that this in no way compromises 

Smyth’s being located within the broad spectrum of female homosexuality that Adrienne 

Rich famously termed the “lesbian continuum.” Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and 

Lesbian Existence,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5, no. 4 (1980): 631–60, 

repr. in her Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985 (New York: W.W. Norton, 

1986), 23–75. 

13  Smyth’s six operas are Fantasio (1892–94), Der Wald [The Forest] (1899–1901), Les 

naufrageurs [The Wreckers; Standrecht] (1902–04), The Boatswain’s Mate (1913–14), Fête 

galante (1921–22), and Entente cordiale (1923–24).  

14  This is the interpretation I put forward in “‘When a woman speaks the truth about her body,’” 

401–02, 409–12.  

15  Two frequently cited instances of sexual rhetoric in discourse on Smyth’s works (specifically, 

indicating that the nature of her music is somehow unexpected from a woman composer) are 

George Bernard Shaw’s review of a performance of Smyth’s Overture to Shakespeare’s 

Antony and Cleopatra in 1892, and John Fuller Maitland’s discussion of Smyth’s Mass in D 

in the second edition of Grove’s Dictionary, which was reproduced almost verbatim in the 

following three editions. [George] Bernard Shaw, Music in London 1890–94, 3 vols. 

(London: Constable, 1932), 2:36–40, at 37 (originally published in The World, 2 March 

1892); [J.A. Fuller] M[aitland], “Smyth, Ethel Mary,” in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and 

Musicians, ed. J.A. Fuller Maitland, 2nd ed., 5 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1904–10), 4 

 



 37 

 

(1908): 490–91, at 490. That Smyth was indeed aware of, and objected to, the gendered 

remarks occasioned by her music is evident from her subsequent correspondence with Shaw; 

see Smyth, “A Final Burning of Boats,” A Final Burning of Boats etc., 3–54, at 34–36.  

16  See in particular Elizabeth Wood, “Performing Rights: A Sonography of Women’s Suffrage,” 

Musical Quarterly 79, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 606–43, in which a variety of musical 

codifications of lesbianism (and feminist tendencies) are identified in relation to Smyth’s 

works associated with the period she devoted to the women’s suffrage movement between 

1910 and 1912. Other of Wood’s enlightening articles in which similar lines of inquiry are 

pursued include “Gender and Genre in Ethel Smyth’s Operas,” in The Musical Woman: An 

International Perspective, vol. 2, ed. Judith Lang Zaimont, Catherine Overhauser, and Jane 

Gottlieb (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1987), 493–507; “Lesbian Fugue: Ethel Smyth’s 

Contrapuntal Arts,” in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music 

Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 164–83; 

“Sapphonics,” in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, 

Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 1994), 27–66, at 44–55; and 

“The Lesbian in the Opera: Desire Unmasked in Smyth’s Fantasio and Fête galante,” in En 

travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera, ed. Corinne E. Blackmer and Patricia Juliana 

Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 285–305. For further discussion, see 

Wiley, “‘When a woman speaks the truth about her body,’” 410–11.  

17  Among several other studies see, for example, Peter Jacobs, “‘The Second Violin Tuning in 

the Ante-room’: Virginia Woolf and Music,” in The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf, ed. 

 



 38 

 

Diane F. Gillespie (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 227–60; Patricia 

Laurence, “The Facts and Fugue of War: From Three Guineas to Between the Acts,” in 

Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth, ed. Mark Hussey (Syracuse, NY: 

Syracuse University Press, 1991), 225–45; Émilie Crapoulet, Virginia Woolf: A Musical Life 

(London: Cecil Woolf, 2009); and Emma Sutton, Virginia Woolf and Classical Music: 

Politics, Aesthetics, Form (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).  

18  These include Jane Marcus, “Virginia Woolf and Her Violin: Mothering, Madness, and 

Music,” in Mothering the Mind: Twelve Studies of Writers and their Silent Partners, ed. Ruth 

Perry and Martine Watson Brownley (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1984), 180–201, repr. 

in Marcus, Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington: Indiana 

University Press, 1987), 96–114; Raitt, “The tide of Ethel”; and Elicia Clements, “Virginia 

Woolf, Ethel Smyth, and Music: Listening as a Productive Mode of Social Interaction,” 

College Literature 32, no. 3 (July 2005): 51–71. There are also a number of biographical 

texts on one of the women that feature a dedicated chapter on the other.  

19  For instance, Elicia Clements has asserted that “Smyth did not influence Woolf’s musical 

thinking directly,” a view I hope to have nuanced in the course of this essay by adding wider 

context. Clements, “Virginia Woolf, Ethel Smyth, and Music,” 51.  

20  Virginia Woolf, “Ethel Smyth,” The New Statesman, 23 April 1921, repr. in The Essays of 

Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie, 4 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1986–94; vols. 5–6, ed. 

Stuart N. Clarke, 2009–11), 3:297–301.  

21  Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 30 November 1919, in Letters, 2:405.  

 



 39 

 

22  See Woolf’s letters to Smyth of 11 February 1930 (Letters, 4:136); 1 April 1932 (Letters, 

5:40); and 11 and 13 May 1936 (Letters, 6:39).  

23  See Woolf’s letters to Smyth of 7 September 1932 (Letters, 5:101); 21 October 1932 (Letters, 

5:112); 27 and 29 August 1934 (Letters, 5:326); 11 and 13 May 1936 (Letters, 6:39); and 9 

July 1940 (Letters, 6:404).  

24  See Woolf’s letters to Smyth of 12 March 1936 (Letters, 6:21); 20 April 1936 (Letters, 6:27); 

17 September 1938 (Letters, 6:272); and 9 January 1939 (Letters, 6:309). Presumably, Woolf 

had in mind Smyth’s next volume of memoirs, What Happened Next.  

25  Woolf to Smyth, 14 April 1939, in Letters, 6:326. 

26  The editors of The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Nicolson and Trautmann, suggest that Woolf 

“probably invent[ed] it as a collective title for all [Smyth’s] autobiographies” (Letters, 

6:326n2). It is more likely that Woolf simply made a rather embarrassing mistake, given that 

the recipient of the letter was none other than Smyth herself. At first glance, it may appear 

that Woolf was endeavoring to reference Streaks of Life, though surely she would have 

known the title of that volume well enough by 1939. Another possibility is that Woolf was 

using a title that the composer had considered, but ultimately discarded prior to publication.  

27  The letter starts “I’ve only ten minutes before driving off across the hill to lunch” and ends 

“This is a scribble, but write, and I will try to find a better mood soon.” Woolf to Smyth, 24 

December 1940, in Letters, 6:453, 454.  

 



 40 

 

28  Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 28 November 1919, in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne 

Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, 5 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1977–84) [henceforth Diary], 

4 February 1931, 4:10.  

29  Woolf, diary entry, 16 June 1930 (Diary, 3:306).  

30  See Smyth, “Brahms,” chap. 24 of Impressions that Remained, 1:261–70, and “Recollections 

of Brahms,” Female Pipings in Eden, 57–70.  

31  See Smyth, Impressions that Remained, 1:85.  

32  See Jane A. Bernstein, “‘Shout, Shout, Up with Your Song!’ Dame Ethel Smyth and the 

Changing Role of the British Woman Composer,” in Women Making Music: The Western Art 

Tradition, 1150–1950, ed. Jane Bowers and Judith Tick (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986), 

304–24, at 309–10.  

33  Donald Francis Tovey, “Ethel Smyth: Mass in D, for Chorus and Orchestra,” in Essays in 

Musical Analysis, 7 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1935–44), 5:235–42. Woolf 

knew Tovey during his long tenure as Reid Professor of Music at Edinburgh University; 

Smyth’s The Prison received its first performance at one of Tovey’s Edinburgh concerts, 

conducted by the composer, on 19 February 1931.  

34  Kathleen A. Abromeit, “Ethel Smyth, ‘The Wreckers,’ and Sir Thomas Beecham,” Musical 

Quarterly 73, no. 2 (1989): 196–211, at 200.  

35  Although the earliest surviving complete opera is Jacopo Peri’s Euridice (1600), to which 

Caccini himself contributed various numbers, Caccini hastily composed and published a 

setting of the entire opera such that his version appeared in print first.  

 



 41 

 

36  Suzanne G. Cusick, “Of Women, Music, and Power: A Model from Seicento Florence,” in 

Musicology and Difference, ed. Solie, 281–304. The opera’s plot is itself telling, in that the 

fate of the eponymous Ruggiero is entirely dependent upon the outcome of the conflict 

between the two sorceresses who wield the real power in the opera, Alcina (his captor) and 

Melissa (his liberator). More significant for this article is the matter of the musical setting. 

According to Cusick, Caccini’s music constructs male and female characters (in particular, 

Ruggiero and Alcina) differently in terms both of melody and tonality, for instance, in the 

tendency to write in sharp keys for the former and flat keys for the latter. See Cusick, “Of 

Women, Music, and Power,” 290–301; see further her “Francesca Caccini,” in The New 

Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie, 4 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1992), 1:669. 

While a note of caution should perhaps be raised with respect to such a reading of a work 

written during a period when little documented evidence exists for the mapping of binaries of 

gender onto those of tonality, the potential for the use of sharp and flat keys to underscore 

polar opposites such as male and female would surely not have been lost on composers of the 

time, especially since the prevalent tuning systems gave rise to distinct characteristics being 

identified with individual keys. On the subsequent recognition by writers on music of such 

characteristics and their implications to composers, see Rita Steblin, A History of Key 

Characteristics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, 2nd ed. (Rochester, NY: 

University of Rochester Press, 2002). Speaking in general terms, very little of the music of 

opera may be regarded as truly gender-neutral, since the vast majority of its passages are 

inextricably associated with one or more characters and hence with their sex. When 

 



 42 

 

considered alongside Smyth’s output in the genre, one can only conclude that Caccini’s La 

liberazione di Ruggiero provides, on the face of it, a broadly comparable instance of 

“women’s opera,” but one that antedates those of Smyth by nearly three centuries.  

37  Jacqueline Letzter and Robert Adelson, Women Writing Opera: Creativity and Controversy 

in the Age of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).  

38  See The New Statesman, 2, 9, and 16 October 1920, for the article by MacCarthy that had 

prompted Woolf’s initial letter, and their subsequent exchange; Woolf’s discussion of Smyth 

is to be found in the 16 October edition. For further information, see “The Intellectual Status 

of Women,” Appendix III, Diary, 2:339–42, where Woolf’s correspondence is reproduced.  

39  Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 82–83. The internal quotation is from Cecil Gray, A Survey of 

Contemporary Music (London: Humphrey Milford for Oxford University Press, 1924), 245–

46. Gray’s discussion of Tailleferre concludes in much the same vein: “Considered apart 

from her sex, her music is wholly negligible.” In fact, his text was first published four years 

earlier than the date cited by Woolf, though her point still stands.  

40  See Jacobs, “The Second Violin Tuning in the Ante-room,” 231–32.  

41  Virginia Woolf, “The Opera,” The Times, 24 April 1909, and “Impressions at Bayreuth,” The 

Times, 21 August 1909, both repr. in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. McNeillie, 1:269–72 

and 288–93, respectively.  

42  See, for example, Jane Marcus, “Enchanted Organ, Magic Bells: Night and Day as a Comic 

Opera” and “The Years as Götterdämmerung, Greek Play, and Domestic Novel,” in her 

Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy, 18–35 and 36–56, respectively; Emma 

 



 43 

 

Sutton, “‘Within a Space of Tears’: Music, Writing, and the Modern in Virginia Woolf’s The 

Voyage Out,” in Music and Literary Modernism: Critical Essays and Comparative Studies, 

ed. Robert P. McParland (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006), 50–65.  

43  Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. H.C. Colles, 3rd ed., 5 vols. (London: 

Macmillan, 1927–28). Smyth would undoubtedly have had a special interest in the treatment 

of women composers in this publication given the gendered nature of discussion in her entry 

in the previous edition (see above, n15).  

44  Indeed, Howell only ever attained the status of a minor composer. Though she had shown 

significant early promise—her symphonic poem Lamia was premiered at one of Henry 

Wood’s celebrated Promenade Concerts in 1919 (she was aged just 21)—the expectations 

that she generated in musical circles in the 1920s were ultimately not sustained. Tellingly, 

she was added to the fourth edition of Grove’s Dictionary (1940) but became one of a 

number of women composers omitted from the sixth (1980, edited by Stanley Sadie, as The 

New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians), which was published two years prior to her 

death. She was reintroduced in the seventh edition (2001), via The New Grove Dictionary of 

Women Composers, ed. Julie Anne Sadie and Rhian Samuel (London: Macmillan, 1994).  

45  Smyth, “A Final Burning of Boats,” 49.  

46  See, for instance, Smyth, Impressions that Remained, 2:35–37, 73–75, and 84–87.  

47  Smyth to her mother, April 1878, quoted in Smyth, Impressions that Remained, 1:236–37.  

48  A rare reference to the compositional activity of Elisabeth (Lisl) von Herzogenberg, one of 

the most influential characters in Smyth’s entire life, similarly occurs in a passage of 

 



 44 

 

reproduced correspondence. Smyth wrote: “She is absurdly musical and though she doesn’t 

compose much (only songs), is the first feminine musical genius (bar Frau Schumann) that I 

have met.” Smyth to her mother, 7 April 1878, quoted in Smyth, Impressions that Remained, 

1:237.  

49  Specifically, the three songs of Clara Schumann’s op. 12 were combined with nine by her 

husband Robert and jointly published as his op. 37, Zwölf Gedichte aus F. Rückert’s 

“Liebesfrühling” (Leipzig, 1841); six of Fanny Mendelssohn’s songs were published under 

her brother Felix’s name, three each in his Zwölf Gesänge, op. 8 (Berlin, 1826–27) and Zwölf 

Lieder, op. 9 (Berlin, 1830). However, both of these women composers had also published 

works on their own, the bulk of Clara Schumann’s output being issued separately.  

50  Smyth, “Augusta Holmès, Pioneer” [July 1921], A Final Burning of Boats etc., 126–36, and 

What Happened Next, 156–57. Holmès’s “Home Rule” song, which Smyth was fond of 

performing, is also discussed in As Time Went On…, 129–30; her symphonic poem Irlande is 

mentioned, in connection with Henry Wood, in A Final Burning of Boats etc., 80.  

51  Holmès’s four operas—Héro et Léandre, Astarté, Lancelot du lac, and La montagne noire—

were composed between 1875 and 1884.  

52  Smyth, What Happened Next, 157.  

53  Smyth, What Happened Next, 156.  

54  Smyth, “Augusta Holmès, Pioneer,” 131.  

55  Smyth, “Augusta Holmès, Pioneer,” 131.  

56  See Woolf to Smyth, 15 September 1930, in Letters, 4:213.  

 



 45 

 

57  Smyth, “Augusta Holmès, Pioneer,” 133, 134.  

58  Jann Pasler has argued that the early reception of Holmès’s music was linked to gender in 

terms of its supposed masculine characteristics; see the chapter “The Ironies of Gender, or 

Virility and Politics in the Music of Augusta Holmès,” in her Writing Through Music: Essays 

on Music, Culture, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 213–48.  

59  Smyth, What Happened Next, 157.  

60  Smyth may have been suspicious of Holmès because she was known to have had a 

scandalous—yet obviously heterosexual—private life, given the string of love affairs that 

characterized her early adulthood (possibly including one with her composition teacher, 

César Franck) and her long association with the poet Catulle Mendès (with whom she had 

five children, but never married), as well as the general level of attention she was said to have 

received from men.  

61  Smyth, “Female Pipings in Eden,” Female Pipings in Eden, 45, emphasis added.  

62  Smyth, “Female Pipings in Eden,” 33.  

63  Virginia Woolf, “Speech Before the London/National Society for Women’s Service, January 

21 1931,” in The Pargiters by Virginia Woolf: The Novel-Essay Portion of The Years, ed. 

Mitchell A. Leaska (London: Hogarth, 1978), xxvii–xliv, at xxvii–xxviii. Earlier drafts of the 

start of the speech are even more strongly worded in this respect (see ibid., xxvii and 165).  

64  Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London: Hogarth, 1938), 162, 163. Woolf’s observation 

about women’s exclusion from orchestral playing was potentially misleading in that it did not 

acknowledge the possibilities that existed by the time of writing for women to join orchestras. 

 



 46 

 

Lady Radnor’s all-female orchestra had been celebrated in England at the turn of the 

twentieth century, and a number of professional women’s orchestras were founded in the 

1920s and 1930s on both sides of the Atlantic. In particular, the British Women’s Symphony 

Orchestra had previously come to Woolf’s attention, in that Smyth praised the ensemble in 

her essay “Female Pipings in Eden,” 49.  

65  Smyth, “Literary and Musical Careers Contrasted,” chap. 3 of “Female Pipings in Eden,” 14–

18. See also “A Final Burning of Boats,” esp. 7–11.  

66  See Wiley, “‘When a woman speaks the truth about her body,’” 413.  

67  Smyth, “Female Pipings in Eden,” 14. The two later quotations in this paragraph are taken 

from pages 15 and 16, respectively, of the same source.  

68  Ethel Smyth, “Where Musical Criticism Goes Astray,” Female Pipings in Eden, 71–86.  

69  Smyth, “Where Musical Criticism Goes Astray,” 79.  

70  Elicia Clements has recently argued the latter point with specific reference to A Room of 

One’s Own and Female Pipings in Eden. Clements, “‘As Springy as a Racehorse’: Female 

Piping in Eden as Rejoinder to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own,” in 

Felsensprengerin, Brückenbauerin, Wegbereiterin: Die Komponistin Ethel Smyth / Rock 

Blaster, Bridge Builder, Road Paver: The Composer Ethel Smyth, ed. Cornelia Bartsch, 

Rebecca Grotjahn, and Melanie Unseld (Munich: Allitera Verlag, 2010), 55–68. My essay 

adds further context to this suggestion by demonstrating that the reciprocal influence between 

the two women’s writings extended much further than these two texts alone, and by no means 

traveled in a single direction (from Woolf to Smyth) exclusively.  

 



 47 

 

71  Jane Marcus has speculated that the fourth chapter of Smyth’s “Female Pipings in Eden” 

must have formed at least part of her speech delivered to the London/National Society for 

Women’s Service because it includes the story of the Woking Golf Course mentioned in Vera 

Brittain’s oft-cited report on the event (quoted in Woolf, “Speech Before the 

London/National Society for Women’s Service, January 21 1931,” xxxiv–xxxv, unnumb. 

fn.). Marcus, “Thinking Back through Our Mothers,” in New Feminist Essays on Virginia 

Woolf, ed. Marcus (London: Macmillan, 1981), 1–30, at 22. Though the suggestion is not in 

itself inconceivable, the tale recounted in “Female Pipings in Eden” is not the one to which 

Brittain alluded, but a separate incident concerning the Golf Course at Cromer (19–20); the 

Woking anecdote is instead to be found in Smyth’s “A Final Burning of Boats,” 39–40, 

which had been published several years prior to her speech. Despite an offer from Woolf on 

behalf of Hogarth Press, Smyth’s speech was never published verbatim, and consequently has 

not survived.  

72  See Woolf to Smyth, 6 June 1933, in Letters, 5:192.  

73  Woolf, “Speech Before the London/National Society for Women’s Service, January 21 

1931,” xxix.  

74  See Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 100–102.  

75  Smyth, “A Final Burning of Boats,” 7. Despite her claim that Austen wrote her books “in 

secret,” Smyth would have been aware (as would Woolf) that Austen’s literary activity was 

known to her family and friends. Elsewhere, Smyth related that her great-uncle and Austen 

had been “close friends,” and that Austen had surreptitiously attempted to find out his true 

 



 48 

 

feelings about one of her novels via a mutual acquaintance. See Smyth, Impressions that 

Remained, 1:5. 

76  “The truth is, a great mind must be androgynous” (1 September 1832). Specimens of the 

Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, [ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge], 2 vols. 

(London: Murray, 1835), 2:96.  

77  Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 147–48, 157.  

78  Smyth, “Female Pipings in Eden,” 47.  

79  Smyth, “Female Pipings in Eden,” 9–10.  

80  Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 146.  

81  Of the substantial body of scholarly work undertaken in recent years on the feminist 

deconstruction of music history and the corresponding recovery of its mostly forgotten 

women composers, Marcia J. Citron’s Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 1993) stands out for its groundbreaking analysis of the agents 

by which females have been largely excluded as composers from the canons of Western art 

music.  

82  Christopher St. John [Christabel Marshall], Ethel Smyth: A Biography (London: Longmans, 

1959), 82n1.  

83  On female composers active in England during this time period, see Sophie Fuller, “Women 

Composers during the British Musical Renaissance, 1880–1918” (PhD dissertation, King’s 

College, University of London, 1998), which includes case studies of White, Lehmann, 

Frances Allitsen [Mary Frances Bumpus] (1848–1912), Rosalind Ellicott (1857–1924), and 

 



 49 

 

two others to be introduced presently, Dora Bright and Adela Maddison. All six of these 

figures were born within ten years of Smyth. For some illuminating discussion of Smyth’s 

silence over other women composers in her writings, and its wider historiographical 

implications, see ibid., 137–41. 

84  On Smyth’s relationship with the Society of Women Musicians (SWM), see Laura Seddon, 

“The Instrumental Music of British Women Composers in the Early Twentieth Century” 

(PhD dissertation, City University London, 2011), 77. Chaminade was herself president of 

the SWM in 1913–14; as a founding member, Clarke’s involvement with the Society 

predated her period of success as a composer, though my point nonetheless stands. See 

further, Laura Seddon, British Women Composers and Instrumental Chamber Music in the 

Early Twentieth Century (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).  

85  See Maude Valérie White, My Indian Summer: A Second Book of Memories (London: 

Grayson & Grayson, 1932), 12. As noted above, no corresponding account of such a meeting 

is to be found in Smyth’s writings. Her Sicilian tour of 1903 is briefly discussed in What 

Happened Next, 227–29.  

86  See Sophie Fuller, The Pandora Guide to Women Composers: Britain and the United States 

1629–Present (London: Pandora, 1994), 204.  

87  Writing in January 1928, the date given for both the essay “A Final Burning of Boats” and 

the volume of the same title, Smyth would have had access to the first three volumes of the 

third edition of Grove’s Dictionary (all published in 1927), in which an article on Maddison 

would have been found. Maddison’s career may have been over by this time (she died in 

 



 50 

 

1929 following a prolonged period of illness), but she had not appeared in the dictionary’s 

second edition (see n15) either. Other omissions included Dora Bright (1863–1951), a more 

established composer than Dorothy Howell by 1927, and probably also more historically 

significant; and the prolific but short-lived Morfydd Owen (1891–1918), much of whose 

music had then recently been published posthumously in a multivolume edition (1923–24).  

88  It was a title that engendered disapproval from Woolf, who deemed it “diffuse” and 

“facetious when you mean to be serious.” Woolf to Smyth, 6 June 1933, in Letters, 5:192.  

89  See Smyth, “Female Pipings in Eden,” 3; see further, ibid., 6 and 55–56 for the continuation 

of and conclusion to the tale.  

90  Marcus, “Thinking Back through Our Mothers,” 26.  

91  Smyth, “Female Pipings in Eden,” 38.  

92  Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An essay on Tolstoy’s view of history (London: 

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953). Berlin himself borrowed the terms from a fragment of 

ancient Greek poetry by Archilochus.  

93  Woolf to Smyth, 6 December 1940, in Letters, 6:450. Woolf confessed to an “ulterior 

motive” in making this suggestion, namely her desire to “investigate the influence of music 

on literature” (ibid.). The final page of the letter was lost prior to publication, so it is not 

known how Woolf expanded upon her ideas.  

94  Woolf, The Common Reader: First Series (see n5) and The Common Reader: Second Series 

(London: Hogarth, 1932).  

95  Ethel Smyth, “Composers and Critics,” The New Statesman, 9 May 1931, 389–90.  

 



 51 

 

96  Woolf to Smyth, 27 June 1931, in Letters, 4:348.  

97  Woolf to Smyth, 13 December 1937, in Letters, 6:191. From the present vantage point, it is 

difficult not to read resonances of Smyth’s own deafness in Woolf’s words, but this is 

presumably unintended.  

98  Woolf to Smyth, 24 February 1938, in Letters, 6:217, italics in original.  

99  See Smyth, “Female Pipings in Eden,” esp. 7–13, 46–49.  

100  Upon reading an early draft of this essay, Woolf had written to the author that “I think its 

very good tempered, and urbane, and, if a little diffuse, still genial, undeniable, and full of 

truth, and facts. What facts!” Woolf to Smyth, 19 November 1933, in Letters, 5:249.  

101  The vast majority of the correspondence from Smyth to Woolf has been lost; fewer than 

ninety items are held in The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public 

Library, of which some fifteen relate to the period 1938–41. But even if more comprehensive 

documentation were available yet no evidence of a written response from Smyth was evident, 

the possibility would remain that she had replied to her friend’s request for information 

verbally. My suspicion, however, is that Woolf’s questions remained unanswered, because 

Smyth surely would have furnished her with further detail on issues such as women’s 

admission to orchestras than ultimately appeared in Three Guineas.  

102  Woolf, Three Guineas, 69–70.  

103  Woolf, Three Guineas, 249–50.  

104  This observation is given further weight by an additional reference to music in the endnotes 

for chapter 2: “Chastity was invoked to prevent her from studying medicine; from painting 

 



 52 

 

the nude; from reading Shakespeare; from playing in orchestras; from walking down Bond 

Street alone.” Woolf, Three Guineas, 298–99.  

105  In addition to those quoted elsewhere in my essay, passing mentions of music in Three 

Guineas include: in chapter 1, Woolf’s proposition that a poor women’s college in need of 

rebuilding would have to “teach only the arts that can be taught cheaply and practised by 

poor people; such as medicine, mathematics, music, painting and literature” (page 62), and 

that “Musicians, painters, writers, would teach there, because they would learn” (63); her 

suggestion that the nineteenth-century “educated man’s daughter” living in her father’s house 

might, in the winter months, have “studied history and literature and music, and tried to draw 

and paint” (69); in chapter 2, Woolf’s engagement with the view that those professionals who 

achieve great success become so consumed with their work that they have “no time to look at 

pictures . . . no time to listen to music . . . [and] no time for conversation” (131); her 

observation that, irrespective of wealth, daughters of educated men may “Go to the public 

galleries and look at pictures; turn on the wireless and rake down music from the air; [and] 

enter any of the public libraries which are now free to all” (148); in chapter 3, three allusions 

to “pictures, plays, music and [or] books” (174), plus one to an unspecified “picture, 

symphony, play or poem” (175), in a discussion of how an educated man’s daughter might 

formulate opinions of her own; a reference to a hypothetical space in which such a person 

might privately “speak the truth to artists, about pictures, music, books, without fear of 

affecting their sales” (178); and finally, Woolf’s suggestion that the educated man’s daughter 

might evaluate England’s supposed superiority by “compar[ing] English painting with French 

 



 53 

 

painting; English music with German music; English literature with Greek literature” (196–

97).  

106  See above, n5 for citation. 

107  See William Weber, Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in 

London, Paris, and Vienna (London: Croom Helm, 1975), 31.  

108  Woolf’s admiration for Austen and her work is clearly demonstrated in the extent of the 

discussion she received in her factual literature, not least in dedicated essays including “Jane 

Austen,” Times Literary Supplement, 8 May 1913; “Jane Austen Practising,” The New 

Statesman, 15 July 1922; and “Jane Austen,” The Common Reader: First Series, 168–83, 

repr. in Collected Essays by Virginia Woolf, [ed. Leonard Woolf], 4 vols. (London: Hogarth, 

1966–67), 1:144–54. These writings are reprinted in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. 

McNeillie, 2:9–16, 3:331–35, and 4:146–57, respectively.  

109  [Jane Austen], Sense and Sensibility (London: Egerton, 1811), 3 vols.; Pride and Prejudice 

(London: Egerton, 1813), 3 vols.; Emma (London: Murray, 1816), 3 vols.; Northanger Abbey 

and Persuasion (London: Murray, 1818), 4 vols. On music in/and Austen’s novels see, for 

example, Patrick Piggott, The Innocent Diversion: A Study of Music in the Life and Writings 

of Jane Austen (London: Cleverdon, 1979).  

110  Smyth, “Women’s Training Hitherto,” chap. 2 of “Female Pipings in Eden,” 7–13. Woolf, of 

course, had the additional benefit of reading earlier drafts of this essay.  

 



 54 

 

111  The information presented in the remainder of this paragraph has been garnered from Smyth, 

Impressions that Remained, 1:38, 110–14, and 123–27, an account with which Woolf was 

certainly familiar.  

112  Smyth, Impressions that Remained, 2:5.  

113  Of many modern studies of women’s autobiography, too numerous to cite here, that identify 

the necessity of expanding their scope of inquiry beyond traditional (androcentric) definitions 

of the term, the approach outlined above emerges particularly strongly in The Private Self: 

Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock (London: 

Routledge, 1988).  

114  [Cardinal] John Henry Newman, D.D., Apologia pro vita sua: Being a Reply to a Pamphlet 

entitled “What, Then, Does Dr. Newman Mean?” (London: Longman, Green, Longman, 

Roberts, and Green, 1864, rev. and abr. in 1865 as History of My Religious Opinions). The 

pamphlet in question, Rev. Charles Kingsley’s “What, Then, Does Dr. Newman Mean?”: A 

Reply to a Pamphlet Lately Published by Dr. Newman (London: Macmillan, 1864), was itself 

occasioned by Newman’s publication of letters between them as Mr. Kingsley and Dr. 

Newman: A Correspondence on the Question Whether Dr. Newman Teaches that Truth is No 

Virtue? (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1864).  

115  Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s multivolume Les confessions, written in the 1760s and probably 

completed in 1770, was first published posthumously in the 1780s.  

116  Woolf to Gerald Brenan, 4 October 1929, in Letters, 4:98.  

117  Woolf to Smyth, 6 June 1933, in Letters, 5:191, 193; and 8 June 1933, in Letters, 5:194, 195.  

 



 55 

 

118  Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical 

Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind, 2nd ed. (London: Hogarth, 1985), 64–159.  

119  Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), 603.  

120  Smyth, As Time Went On…, 4.  


	Music and Literature: Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf, and  “The First Woman to Write an Opera”