Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) was an exceptional woman in an age rich in strong personalities. Best known for her opera The Wreckers, her music, long neglected, is gradually winning new friends. A feminist, intrepid traveller and sportswoman, she wrote nine volumes of autobiography, vividly recounting a life packed with incident. Aged nineteen, in the face of fierce opposition from her father, she went to Germany to study and 'plunged joyfully into the dear old sea of German music which surged about the feet of Brahms', befriending Schumann's widow, Clara, and the composer Heinrich von Herzogenberg and his wife, Lisl, the first of many women to whom Ethel was passionately attached. Her writings, abridged by Ronald Crichton, and including a catalogue of her music, are full of brilliant portraits - Brahms, Mahler, Beecham, Emmeline Pankhurst and Queen Victoria - all described in uncompromising detail. Numerous anecdotes range from hurling a brick through a cabinet minister's window, resulting in two months in Holloway prison - where she was observed, leaning through the bars, conducting her March of the Women with a toothbrush - to an Egyptian visit where she sought out a hermaphrodite in order to make an anatomical examination.
IMPRESSIONS THAT REMAINED emoirs By ETHEL SMYTH Introduction by ERNEST NEWMAN NEW YORK ALFKED A. EDSTOPF 1 946 FIRST PUBLISHED 1919 by Longmans, Green Co., Ltd RESET AND REPRINTED September 1946 INTRODUCTION COPYRIGHT 1946 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages or reproduce not more than three illustrations in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper. Manufactured in the United States of America. Published simul taneously in Canada by The Ryerson Press. This is a Borzoi Book, published by Alfred A, Knopf, Inc. The Author, agd afam jfk e IN MEMORY OF M E P THE HON. LADY PONSONBY AND OF OUR LONG FRIENDSHIP 1890 1916 1 find Lady Ponsonby, the wise judge the firm Liberal, more and more de lightful at last one feels she is getting old she is eighty-two. She is like a fine flame kindled by sea-logs and sandlewood good to watch and good to warm the mind at, and the heart too. EDITH SICHELL 1914 INTRODUCTION Ethel Smyths Impressions That Remained when it was first published in England I expressed the opinion that this was one of the half-dozen best autobiographies in the English language. This estimate has been confirmed by a recent re-reading of it for the present American edition. But there are several other books by the same author equally worth reading, for Ethel Smyth was one of the most remarkable women of her epoch and I am glad that a request from Mr. Alfred Knopf to furnish an Introduction to this new edition affords me an opportunity of telling the American musi cal public more about her than is contained in her firstbook. The autobiography may be trusted to tell its own story so far as it goes. But it was issued in 1919, and a great deal happened be tween then and the authors death in 1944. The memoirs, apart from a brief reference in the Epilogue to friends or incidents of the years immediately following, carry us only as far as 1892. Writing as she did in 1918 her scope was necessarily restricted here and there by the fact that several people who had played a considerable part in her life-story were still alive. One of these was the Ex-Empress Eug6-nie of France, with whom she was on terms of close friendship for more than a quarter of a century from 1890 onwards, the Empresss English estate at Farnborough Hill being close to the Smyth house at Frimley and to later residences of Ethel. It would obviously have been impossible for the author to write about the Empress at any length or with any freedom while she was still alive. She died, at the age of ninety-five in July 1920 a year or so after the publication of the Impressions and in her second book, Streaks of Life 1921, Ethel Smyth painted a portrait of her that is not only fascinating in itself but of value to students and historians of the Second Empire. The passing of the Empress from the scene also placed the author Introduction at liberty to indulge in some amusing reminiscences of the old Queen Victoria, with whom she had come into contact through Eug6nie they include the rich story, told with rich humour, of the dreadful breach of etiquette of which Ethel was innocently guilty at an after-dinner reception at Balmoral. At one end of the large room was a fireplace, and in front of this a hearthrug on which, in remote dignity, the Queen wasstanding with the Empress. Lead ing up to the two august ladies, says Ethel, was an avenue composed of royal personages ranged, as I afterwards found out, in order of precedence, the highest in rank being closest to the hearthrug which avenue, broadening towards its base, gradually became mere ladies and gentlemen of the Court, and finally petered out in a group of Maids of Honour huddled ingloriously in the bay-window...
These intimate memoirs of one of the greatest composers of classical music, Ethel Smyth, are first-hand accounts of the remarkable woman’s life in music and in the suffragette movement. Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) was an English composer and the first woman in her field to be granted a damehood. First published in 1919, this autobiography highlights her wit and humour, while giving personal and reflective insights into her childhood and working life. Detailing her career journey, exploring her relationships with some of history’s biggest names, and disclosing information regarding her activism for women’s suffrage, Ethel Smyth’s memoirs are a fascinating and insightful read. This volume is divided into three parts: - The Smyth Family Robinson - Germany and Two Winters in Italy - In the Desert
This collection of twelve essays discusses the principles and practices of women's autobiographical writing in the United States, England, and France from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Employing feminist and poststructuralist methodologies, t
Shortly before his death, S. P. Rosenbaum began work on the history of the Bloomsbury Group's 'Memoir Club'. With original archival material and valuable insights on leading Bloomsbury figures such as Woolf, Keynes and Forster, this illuminating book offers a new perspective on our understanding of twentieth-century autobiography and life writing.
In Bloomsbury Recalled, Quentin Bell has written an extraordinary memoir of the circle of intellectuals in London early in this century know as the Bloomsbury group. Bell offers remarkable judgments about and recollections of each of the notable people among whom he came of age. Here are Bell's candid portraits of his parents, Clive and Vanessa Bell - Virginia Woolf's sister - Vanessa's lover, Duncan Grant, and of Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Ottoline Morrell, and others who frequented Gordon Square in Bloomsbury and Charleston, the Bells' country place in Sussex. The stories of this enchanting extended family, the private lives of these public figures, have all the magic and intrigue of the best novels of the day. Bloomsbury Recalled, in the expansive storytelling tradition of the early modernists, re-creates the captivating theater of events that was Bloomsbury.
This is the major autobiographical statement from Nobel laureate André Gide. In the events and musings recorded here we find the seeds of those themes that obsessed him throughout his career and imbued his classic novels The Immoralist and The Counterfeiters. Gide led a life of uncompromising self-scrutiny, and his literary works resembled moments of that life. With If It Die, Gide determined to relay without sentiment or embellishment the circumstances of his childhood and the birth of his philosophic wanderings, and in doing so to bring it all to light. Gide’s unapologetic account of his awakening homosexual desire and his portrait of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas as they indulged in debauchery in North Africa are thrilling in their frankness and alone make If It Die an essential companion to the work of a twentieth-century literary master.
