Ethel Mary Smyth

Biography

Dame Ethel Mary Smyth (1858-1944) was an English composer, women’s suffragist, and writer. She dedicated most of her life to composing music, but later wrote memoirs, travel writing, and polemical works. She was an avid women’s suffragist who wanted “women to turn their minds to big and difficult jobs; not just to go on hugging the shore, afraid to put out to sea” (210). When she came to a marriageable age, she quarreled violently with her father who wanted her to marry instead of pursuing a musical education. When she finally received permission, she studied music composition in Leipzig, Germany. This major step in her life allowed her to later write Female Pipings in Eden, a book about the lack of opportunity for women in the field of music composition.

Smyth never married, but she had both male and female lovers throughout her life. She also became well acquainted with many influential and rich women, who often offered her financial backing to premiere her musical productions. In 1919, Smyth discovered that she was slowly turning deaf, and resorted to writing instead of composing music. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography relays that “Her writings expressed her increasing conviction that her career had been stunted by sex discrimination, a belief that verged on an obsession in her old age which she never tired of expounding.” “An Adventure in a Train,” which she included in her book Streaks of Life, was also published in The London Mercury in 1920. The narrator’s interaction with an ordinary housewife who joins the train ride displays Smyth’s sympathy toward women who never had an opportunity to become educated. Furthermore, this ‘adventure’ is of the narrator’s observation of the thoughts, words, and lives of ordinary women; the narrator takes time to write down what she observes and hears in her notebook.