  Ancestor Index
 Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) - composer
and militant suffragette - was, according to
Smyth of Barbavilla family historian, Stephen
Penny, 'a celebrated descendant' of
William Smyth of Ireland, descended from the
Yorkshire Smyth line treated on this site. Click on the
"Rosedale Spot" to access a
comprehensive history of that lineage - written
by American cousin, David Smyth,
of the Hutchinson Smyth branch of the family.
Use the image
of Dame Ethel Smyth to access a page which outlines her
genealogy and family background. This page added with
updtaed information, August 2003.
Dame Ethel
Smyth - Public Persona
From a young age, Ethel Smyth was
taught piano and music theory - very much valued as the
'ladylike accomplishments' of the day but a turning point
came when she was about twelve years old. She heard a new
governess, who had studied in Leipzig, playing Beethoven
and she decided then and there that she wanted to become
a composer. Her love for music developed into a passion
but her family did not approve of the intensity of her
interest and her father fought against her ambition. He
made her give up all study of serious music. There
followed a two year struggle - a protracted campaign
during which she "went on strike" and ended up
virtually confining herself to her room. She refused to
attend meals, to be present at official or family
functions and neither would she go to church of a Sunday.
Eventually, her father did give in to her wishes
but, for the Major General, this must have been his most
difficult campaign. In 1877, at the age of nineteen, she
was finally allowed to go to Leipzig to further her music
education. In Leipzig, she met Brahms who did not take
her music seriously, and she met Pyotry Tchaikovsky who
encouraged her to find her own style. She also met Clara
Schumann but she left the Leipzig Conservatorium of Music
after only one year, feeling that she was not being
taught properly and she began private study with Heinrich
Herzogenberg.
In 1890 she made her début in England
with her 'Seranade in D' at the Crystal Palace. She
established her reputation with her 'Mass in D' which was
performed at the Albert Hall. In 1903 her Der Wald
became the first and only opera by a woman to be
performed in New York's Metropolitan Opera.
Works such as her opera, The Wreckers, and
her Mass in D were received with great acclaim
at their début. However, she struggled for recognition
as a composer - especially as a female composer in a male
dominated profession - for most of her life. In all, she
composed over two hundred works, ranging from operas to
symphonies, concertos, dozens of lieder (German folk
songs), orchestral songs, choruses, canticles, string
quartets, comic short operas, and masses.
Dame Ethel's song, The
March of the Women, was adopted and sung by
suffragettes throughout London and, most famously -
though away from public eyes and ears - at Holloway
Prison in 1912. For a period of some two years, during
which time she gave up music completely, Dame Ethel Smyth
allied herself closely with the suffragette leader,
Emmeline Pankhurst. Emmeline was born Emmeline
Goulden, in Manchester. (Internet trawling has,
from a vague recollection, seen the family name of
Goulden associated with Smyth family in other contexts.) 
In 1879, Emmeline married
Richard Pankhurst, author of Britain's first
Women's-Suffrage Bill and the Married Women's Property
Acts of 1870 and 1882. In 1889 she founded the Women's
Franchise League, which, in 1894, secured for married
women the right to vote in local elections. After holding
municipal offices in Manchester, in 1903 she founded the
Women's Social and Political Union. However, from 1912
she advocated a strategy of extreme militancy, mainly in
the form of arson, and was arrested 12 times in one year.
Dame Ethel Smyth spent several weeks in Holloway Prison
with more than a hundred others - including Pankhurst -
after this well-coordinated series of attacks on the
homes of their anti-suffrage opponents. Ethel was
imprisoned in March 1912 when she was arrested for
smashing the windows of the Colonial Secretary. Windows
had been smashed all over London in this 'campaign'. At
Holloway, whilst the inmates were exercising one day -
and singing her 'March of the Women' - she
appeared at the window of her cell above them and could
be seen wildly and gleefully conducting the singers with
her toothbrush. Emmeline Pankhurst died in 1928 but she
survived just long enough to hear that a bill had been
passed to give voting rights to all women. She died a few
weeks later
The words to Dame Ethel's
song were written by Cicely Hammill -
better known by her 'stage' name as Cicely Hamilton
(1872-1952). She was an actress and playwright. Her
father died when she was eighteen and she had to make her
own way. She became a pupil teacher and then turned to
acting. She found work with touring companies but it was
impossible for her to make a living that way. She left
the stage and began to write. After the publication of
her first play she became interested in women's suffrage,
joining the Women's Social and Political Union and then
the Women's Freedom League. She helped to found the Women
Writers' Suffrage League and produced propaganda for the
cause - amongst other things, the words for Ethel's 'March
of the Women'. She also wrote the play, 'How the
Vote was Won'. Her best known book is 'Marriage
As a Trade' (1909), which deals extensively with the
inequity of womens' lack of economic and sexual
independence within marriage - being seen and known only
in relationship to a man. 
From 1919 onwards, Dame
Ethel devoted her time to writing books, mainly biographical material, but which body
of work forms a rich and comprehensive social tapestry.
She was at first mocked - but later encouraged - in her
writing by Virginia Woolf. She had also been gently
caricatured in E.F. Benson's 1893 novel Dodo -
in the character of Edith Staines.
In connection with Dame Ethel's
friendship with Virginia Woolf comes this anecdote
pointed out by family historian, David Smyth and discovered in The Little, Brown Book of
Anecdotes - Clifton Fadiman, General Editor 1985.
- Leonard and Virginia
Woolf invited Dame Ethel, then quite elderly, to
dinner at their house at Rodmell in Sussex.
"Dame Ethel bicycled the
twenty miles from the village where she lived to Rodmell,
dressed in rough tweeds. About two miles from her
destination she decided that perhaps she was not suitably
dressed for a dinner party. She thought that possibly
corsets were required to smarten up her figure.
Accordingly, she went into a village shop and asked for
some corsets. There were none. Distressed, she looked
round the shop and her eye lighted on a bird cage, which
she purchased. About twenty minutes later, Virginia went
into her garden to discover Dame Ethel in a state of
undress in the shrubbery, struggling with the bird cage,
which she was wrenching into the shape of corsets and
forcing under her tweeds."
Adapted from
"Under Full Sails: Dame Ethel Smyth"
by Barbara Grier alias Dorothy
Lyle.
"Ethel
[Smyth] is much more famous for her writing and
for her enormous capacity for good friendships
than for her composing. Despite the essentially
self-centered approach necessitated by this kind
of writing, where I, I, I, is the major subject,
she was able to remain fascinating at all times.
She had the skill necessary to make the most
minute and mundane recountings intelligent and
interesting. Part of it, no doubt, is because she
genuinely enjoyed living, and liked so many
diverse people."
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- According to British
Manuscript Commission records, Dame Ethel
also corresponded often with Madame Lucie
Barbier (1875-1963) who was a singer and
pianist, closely involved with La
Société des Concerts Français between
1907 and 1916.
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- In later life Dame Ethel
was forced to give up her musical career
because of increasing deafness but Dame
Ethel Mary Smyth was a remarkable woman
in many respects and became very much
part of the artistic, creative, political
and intellectual movements of her time.
Besides her success as a composer -
which, even in the modern era, is the
subject of some debate - she was an
advocate of free personal relationships.
She developed associations (romantic and
artistic) with many of the leading female
writers of the era - several of whom were
also associated with Kit
(Clementina) Anstruther-Thomson, a maternal line cousin,
treated elsewhere on this site. See
Notes below.
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Edited from "Under Full Sails:
Dame Ethel Smyth" by Barbara
Grier alias Dorothy Lyle.
"From
the start of her teen years, she [Dame Ethel
Smyth] began her lifelong pattern of passionate
friendships. She was quite sincerely loved by
dozens of women (besides those she was actually
in love with, or was loved by) and by a
surprising number of men.
In 1878 [Leipzig]
she became the pupil of Heinrich von Herzonberg.
At the same time she became the lover of his
wife, Lisl (Elizabeth). This relationship was to
be the first of two that basically shaped her
life. Lisl and Ethel were separated by a family
argument, which had nothing to do with their
personal relationship. Ethel never got over this
disappointment, as is amply reflected in her
enormously detailed autobiographical works. The
sense of tragedy in this affair is multiplied by
the fact that when there came a time that a
reconciliation was possible, Lisl died before it
could be accomplished. 
For years
after Lisl there were many women in Ethel's life.
None of them mattered to her greatly, however,
except perhaps one, the pale and lovely [artist]
Julia Brewster. [plus Pauline Trevelyan and
Winnaretta Singer] Julia was important in two
ironic ways. While Ethel was courting Julia,
Julia's husband, Henry Brewster, was busily
pursuing Ethel.
- [ She
first met Henry 'Harry' Brewster - a
philosopher and writer - in Florence in
1882. It is said that he was the man with
whom she had her only heterosexual
experience. They became collaborators and
he wrote some of her librettos. Lisl
(Elizabeth Brewster) was his
sister and the wife of her private
teacher, Heinrich. ]
A list of
the men and women who were extraordinarily fond
of Ethel would, or could, be endless. Ethel, in
her many biographically formed memoirs, always
carefully separates these people into categories.
The men are lumped together as a species apart.
Women are divided into two groups, friends and
lovers. There was little overlapping of the
latter two groups. There is also a small group of
women that Ethel thought of as friends, but that
clearly wished Ethel were more than friendly.
Among her friends were Lady [Mary] Ponsonby, The
Empress Eugénie (who was enormously
fond of Ethel), Sir George Henschel, Virginia
Woolf (Ethel was passionately in love with her,
but there is no evidence that this was returned).
V. Sackville-West and her husband, Edward, who
once lovingly described her as having the profile
of Wagner and Frederick the Great at the same
time.
The pattern
of her emotional relationships is, in one way,
amazing. Though she was briefly attached to
perhaps thirty women in her lifetime (on a
passionate level), she had only two major
affairs. The first, [Lisl] when she was
twenty years old and the object of her affections
was much older. The next time she fell in love
with any real seriousness was in 1919, when she
was sixty-one years old. The object of this
romance was Dr. Edith Anna Oenone Somerville -
the famous lady of the Somerville and Ross
writing team. By this time, 1919, Martin Ross
(Violet Florence Martin), Dr. Somerville's lover
from 1886 until 1915, had been dead three years
and over. For many years, these two Ediths were
to trade endearments and insults, publicly and
privately, and to remain very close. There is no
question that this was a physically unconsummated
affair (unlike Ethel's early affairs) both
because of the age of the ladies and Dr.
Somerville's known views on the
"grosser" aspects of passion. At the
same time, in 1919, Dame Ethel began to publish
what was to become a fantastic amount of
autobiographical writing. 
In addition
to her traveling, her writing, her music and
composing, she carried on a voluminous
correspondence with, literally, dozens of people
over long periods of time. It was said that her
letters ran to at least 1000 words apiece and
often they were 4000 words long. V.
Sackville-West commented that if her
correspondence were to be printed in its
entirety, it would rival the Encyclopedia
Britannica in bulk.
Dame Smyth
lived until 1944, and apparently enjoyed every
minute of her long life. This is very clear in
her own writings. She had unhappy moments, but
the overall picture is a bright and useful one.
She wrote good and bad music, excellent books,
made many good friends, virtually no enemies -
she disliked, or did not approve of, some people,
and was not above "savaging" them in
person or in print (She blasted Vernon
Lee for not admitting her Lesbianism to
herself - in print) - and lived every hour until
her death at age eighty-six. If there were a
heaven, she'd be, no doubt, in charge of
organizational details."
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- Dame Ethel's biographer - Miss
Christopher St. John - completed the biography at the age of
80+. After Miss John's obituary appeared in The
Times newspaper in 1967, Vita
Sackville-West was moved to write to the
paper and had this to say:
| "Something should be
added to your obituary notice of Christopher St.
John, in your issue of October 25, for she was in
the grand tradition of English eccentrics.
One could both tease and please her by calling
her a Shakespeare character. Roaring
rumbuctious at moments who will ever forget her
great laugh as her unwieldy frame rocked with
amusement? - she yet possessed the most delicate
perception of poetry and delight in all forms of
beauty and nature. Of course, she was not
always easy to deal with; eccentrics seldom
are. But much was forgiven her, because she
gave such wealth in return. Her courage should
also be set on record. Few people of her age,
then over 80 would have the pluck and
determination to resume writing the biography of
Dame Ethel Smyth after a serious illness and
weeks in the hospital. Your obituary does
not mention this book, chosen as the Book of the
Month by the Book Society, yet she completed it
and it was published by Messrs. Longmans Green
& Co. in 1958. Not content with this
truly gallant effort, and hampered as always by
physical adversity, she then embarked on a fresh
work connected with Ellen Terry, which illness
once more interrupted, and which she never had
time to complete."
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