As Time Went on...

Smyth, Ethel

doi:10.2307/917882

Cited by 8 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…There were some curious qualities to Lee's own vocal style; she had a 'penetrating high-pitched voice' and although she loved emphasis, she did not speak fast. 68 Willis tells us that 'her slow, foreign articulation of the syllables of words and the peculiar range of her voice, compelled attention'. 69 In his touching obituary for the Times, Maurice Baring rivetingly writes that she spoke 'French like a Frenchwoman of the seventeenth century', and that her Italian was 'forcible, direct' but also as 'nervous' as her 'contrapunctual' English, which was in tune with her 'fugue-like thought'.…”

Section: Listening To Portraits With Vernon Leementioning

confidence: 99%

Voicing the Queer Self: Listening to Portraits with Vernon Lee

Ventrella¹

2023

Art History

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Originating in a critical examination of Vernon Lee's perceived ugliness and her excessive talking among her acquaintances, this essay situates historically a series of portraits in which she features as a sitter, subject of comment and commentator, to suggest that the interweaving of voices and faces can be useful to resist the elision of seeing and knowing on which art historians often base their understanding of gender and sexuality in portraiture. As an art critic, Lee maintained an ambivalent position with regard to portraits. Her familiarity with the new psychology informed a response whereby resonance could shift the sensorial boundaries of the genre beyond its function as likeness. By engaging with Lee's interrogation of the voice of portraits, both in art writing and fiction, the essay examines a series of queer attempts to challenge the authority of the look to identify, define or consume the subject of portraiture. As the late nineteenth century also saw the emergence of talking styles as audible articulations of the queer self, contemporary representations of Lee and her loquacity may be read as queer propositions at a time when dominant discourses around ‘female inversion’ and the ‘speaking woman’ were being fixed by sexologists.

show abstract

Section: Listening To Portraits With Vernon Leementioning

confidence: 99%

Voicing the Queer Self: Listening to Portraits with Vernon Lee

Ventrella¹

2023

Art History

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Even if Smyth succeeded in forging a friendship that was 'the quiet, never provocatively flaunted alliance we had always aimed at', signs of her relationship with a married man were denounced by three of her sisters and her father. 74 Once, when she informed a friend she was going to invite Brewster to stay, the friend interpreted this to mean 'past fructification' and was scandalised. 75 Mary Ponsonby (who succeeded Mary Benson in Smyth's affections) was a craftswoman, an atheist, an intellectual interested in free thought and radical politics, and a tolerant and permissive friend.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Smyth the anarchist: fin-de-siècle radicalism in The Wreckers

Robinson¹

2008

OPR

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This essay explores the roots of Ethel Smyth's opera The Wreckers (1903–04), composed to a libretto by H. B. Brewster, in fin-de-siècle debates on the legal and religious regulation of morality. Taking into account Smyth's jaundiced use of Cornish history, the contribution of Brewster's professed individual anarchism and sexual libertarianism, and Smyth's willingness to parody and manipulate musical conventions in order to reinforce radical ideals, it views the work both as a reflection of its authors' engagement with modernism and as a herald of Smyth's subsequent contribution to militant feminism.

show abstract

Ethel Smyth as the Composer Edith Staines in E. F. Benson’s Dodo Trilogy

Wiley

2020

Palgrave Studies in Life Writing

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Contributing to the first published biography of the composer, author and onetime leading suffragette Dame Ethel Smyth (1958-1944), the writer Vita Sackville-West famously remarked that 'She might concisely have entitled her successive books ME ONE, ME TWO, ME THREE, and so on, even as she called her sheepdogs Pan I, Pan II, Pan III, up to Pan VI' (1959, p. 246). Sackville-West's words referred to Smyth's ten books of prose writings (autobiographies, biographical sketches, and polemical essays on the music profession and the status of women within it) published in her later decades, and, by implication, specifically to her chronological volumes of memoirs, Impressions That Remained (1919), As Time Went On... (1936a) and What Happened Next (1940), which collectively chronicled Smyth's first 50 years. Yet, while her extensive prose writings have received significant scholarly attention, less frequently considered are the various fictional representations of Smyth to have appeared in a range of Anglo-American art over the decades, from novels to plays to radio, television and YouTube videos, doubtless a product of the fascinating and diverse life she led coupled to her distinctive and highly entertaining personality. Smyth was no stranger to such modes of literary adaptation even in her own lifetime, appearing in novels first thinly disguised as the female composer Edith Staines in E.F. Benson's Dodo (1893) and its sequels Dodo's Daughter (1913) and Dodo Wonders (1921), and then as Rose Pargiter in Virginia Woolf's The Years (1937), as well as contributing to the character of Miss La Trobe in Woolf's Between the Acts (1941) (Wood 1983, pp. 137-8). She might, indeed, on occasion have employed analogous strategies in her own creative output: Elizabeth Wood (1995, pp. 614-15, 628) has proposed that she modelled the feisty heroine of 2 her fourth opera, The Boatswain's Mate (1913-14), on none other than Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928), the charismatic leader of the Women's Social and Political Union under whose influence Smyth, who was to become Pankhurst's close friend and ally, pledged two years' service to the 'Votes for Women' campaign in the early 1910s (Wiley 2018a). Neither did Smyth's long-standing friend Henry Brewster (1850-1908), the librettist for her first three operas, escape being similarly immortalised, as the villainous Gilbert Osmond in Henry James's novel The Portrait of a Lady (1881) (Stallman 1958). Subsequently, the female composer Hilda Tablet, who featured in a series of seven satirical radio plays by Henry Reed broadcast on the BBC's Third Programme between 1953 and 1959, was a composite character based principally on a combination of Smyth and Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-83); four of the scripts were later published (Reed 1971). Smyth was not herself one of the central figures of the pioneering six-part BBC television miniseries Shoulder to Shoulder (1974) on the women's suffrage movement in Britain, episodes of which focussed on suffragettes including the Pankhursts, Annie Kenney and Lady Constance...

show abstract

As Time Went on...

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Voicing the Queer Self: Listening to Portraits with Vernon Lee

Voicing the Queer Self: Listening to Portraits with Vernon Lee

Smyth the anarchist: fin-de-siècle radicalism in The Wreckers

Ethel Smyth as the Composer Edith Staines in E. F. Benson’s Dodo Trilogy

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About