'When a woman speaks the truth about her body': Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf, and the challenges of Lesbian autobiography

Abstract

As professionals who encountered first-hand the invidious barriers within patriarchal society that hindered career women, Ethel Smyth and Virginia Woolf both used their published writings to pursue lifelong crusades against the under-representation of females in their respective disciplines. This article compares the different strategies by which the two artists strove to tell the truth about their experiences as women, and considers the corresponding implications for Smyth's musical output. While the egotistical Smyth candidly recounted stories relating to herself, Woolf excised overt authorial presence from her texts, instead invoking fictitious, protean narrators to reflect the collective unconsciousness of Womanhood. Woolf's encouragement and criticism of Smyth's literary endeavours are examined in the context of her biographical theories and feminist critiques, and of the lesbian proclivities of both women. Their published writings and personal documents suggest that Smyth actively appealed to the very autobiographical strategies that Woolf persistently counselled her to subvert, in order to compete with the (heterosexual) patriarchy on equal terms. She apparently held this option to be the only available one through which to insinuate herself within the canonical traditions specific to music, as distinct from those of literature. © 2004 Oxford University Press.