Ethel Smyth was an English composer, writer, and member of the women's suffrage movement.
The idea for Smyth's Cornish-set opera The Wreckers (1906) came to her whilst taking a walking tour in Cornwall twenty years earlier, in 1886. Visting Piper's Hole on Tresco in the Isles of Scilly was particularly inspiring: thought to have been used for smuggling in the seventeenth century, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century a punt was kept to ferry tourists across the subterranean pool inside. Smyth set The Wreckers in the eighteenth century, painting a dramatic and romantic picture of a remote community fueled by fanatical religion and self-regard that leads to the justification of murder – of sailors on ships led to wreck on the shore and by two lovers who try to put an end to the practice.
In 1911, Smyth broke off her musical career in order to devote herself to the women's suffrage movement, joining the Women's Social and Political Union under Emmeline Pankhurst. She established a close relationship with Pankhurst and during her two years of activity in the movement she wrote its battle hymn, The March of the Women, arranged fundraising concerts, and went to gaol for smashing a window. In the following decades, she published feminist polemic, such as Female Pipings in Eden. (1)
In her late life, Smyth struck up a close friendship with Virginia Woolf. Their first meeting was in 1930, when Smyth burst into Woolf's bedroom in Tavistock Square in 1930 as she recovered from influenza, but Woolf had attended the London premiere of The Wreckers in 1909. Smyth was, by all accounts, smitten with Woolf, who likened Smyth's affection to 'being caught by a giant crab'. (2)
Sources
(1) Kertesz, Elizabeth. "Smyth, Dame Ethel Mary (1858–1944), composer, writer, and suffragist." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 23 Sep. 2004; Accessed 21 Apr. 2023.
(2) Lumsden, R. (2015) “The Music Between Us”: Ethel Smyth, Emmeline Pankhurst, and “Possession” Feminist Studies 41:2, p339n10
