The following is a working bibliography of scholarship on the life and music of Dame Ethel Smyth, including Smyth’s memoirs and published essays. Sources are listed alphabetically. Any errors or omissions are my own. I am currently updating this page – if you know of a source that should be listed here, please contact us!

— Amy Zigler, PhD

Anderson, Gwen. Ethel Smyth: The Burning Rose: A Brief Biography. London: Cecil Woolf Publishers, 1997.

Bartsch, Cornelia. “’(Anti)Primitivismus’? Ethel Smyth’s ‘Grosse Fuge’ (1913).” MusikTheorie 29, no. 4 (2014): 317–32.

Bernstein, Jane A. “’Shout, Shout, Up with Your Song!’ Dame Ethel Smyth and the Changing Role of the British Woman Composer.” In Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150-1900, ed. by Jane Bowers and Judith Tick, 304-322. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985.

Broad, Leah. Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World. Faber & Faber, 2023.

Citron, Marcia J. “Dr. Marcia J. Citron on The Wreckers at Houston Grand Opera.” Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy. https://wophil.org/marcia-j-citron-wreckers-houston/?doing_wp_cron=1672092456.1806221008300781250000

Clements, Elicia. “Virginia Woolf, Ethel Smyth, and Music: Listening as a Productive Mode of Social Interaction.” College Literature 32, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 51-71.

Collis, Louise. Impetuous Heart: The Story of Ethel Smyth. London: William Kimber & Co. Limited, 1984.

Dale, Kathleen. “Dame Ethel Smyth,” Music & Letters 25, no. 4 (1944): 191-194.

_____. “Ethel Smyth’s Prentice Works.” Music & Letters 30, no. 4 (1949): 329-336.

D’Silva, Beverley. “Ethel Smyth: An Extraordinary ‘Lost’ Opera Composer.” BBC Culture Online. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220720-ethel-smyththe-rebel-composer-erased-from-history

Farny, Natasha. “‘Worthy of the Canon’: Romantic Cello Sonatas by Women.” College Music Symposium 61, no. 2 (Fall 2021): 68-82.

Franca, John. “An Ethel Smyth discovery.” The Strad 91, no. 1090 (1981): 718-19.

Fuller, Sophie. “Smyth, Dame Ethel (Mary).” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 23 (2001): 591-594.

_____. “Women Composers During the British Musical Renaissance, 1880-1918.” Ph. D. diss., King’s College, University of London, 1998.

Fuller-Maitland, J.A. “Smyth, (Dame) Ethel (Mary).” The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 7 (1954): 860-863.

Gates, Eugene. “Damned If You Do and Damned If You Don’t: Sexual Aesthetics and the Music of Dame Ethel Smyth.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 31, no. 1 (University of Illinois, Spring 1997): 63-71.

_____. “The Woman Composer Question: Four Case Studies from the Romantic Era.” Ed. D. diss., University of Toronto, 1992.

Gibbon, Rachel. “The Early Operas of Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944): Geneses, Performance, Structure,” 2 vols. PhD diss., University of Manchester, 2005.

Gillett, Paula. Musical Women in England, 1870-1914: “Encroaching on All Man’s Privileges.” New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

Gisbrecht, Nancy. “An Examination of the Operatic Environment in Which Ethel Smyth Composed and Its Effect On Her Career.” M.A. Thesis, University of South Carolina, 1980.

Halstead, Jill. The Woman Composer: Creativity and the Gendered Politics of Musical Compositions. Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1997.

Hardy, Lisa. The British Piano Sonata, 1870-1945. Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2001.

Harris, Amanda. “Recomposing Her History: the Memoirs and Diaries of Ethel Smyth.” Life Writing 8, no. 4 (2011): 421-431.

_____. “The Smyth-Brewster Correspondence: A Fresh Look at the Hidden Romantic World of Ethel Smyth.” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 14, no. 1 (2010): 72-94.

Hoffmann, Marleen. “’It Seemed to Me My First Duty to Signify I Was One of the Fighters’: Ethel Smyth’s Two Years of Suffrage Activities and Her Suffrage Music.” In Women’s Suffrage in Word, Image, Music, Stage and Screen: The Making of a Movement, ed. by Christopher Wiley and Lucy Ella Rose. Routledge, 2021.

Hughes, Jennifer Gwynn. “Sapphonic Listening: Ethel Smyth’s String Quartet in E minor.” M.A. thesis, University of Virginia, 1995.

Hull, Robin. “Dame Ethel Smyth.” Tempo 7 (1944): 12.

Hurd Michael, “Smyth, Dame Ethel (Mary),” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 17 (1980): 425-26.

Hyde, Derek. New-found Voices: Women in Nineteenth-century English Music. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1998.

Jezic, Diane Peacock. Women Composers: The Lost Tradition Found, foreword by Elizabeth Wood. New York: The Feminist Press, 1988.

 Johannes Brahms: The Herzogenberg Correspondence, ed. by Max Kalbeck and trans. by Hannah Bryant. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1909.

Johnson, Carl. “Ethel Smyth: The Only Woman Composer Ever to be Heard at the Met. American Music Teacher 31 (1981): 14-17.

Keays, Mary Lee. “Tooting Her Own Horn: Dame Ethel Smyth’s Trio for Horn, Violin and Piano.” DMA diss., University of California – Los Angeles, 2001.

Lee, Ean-Ju. “A Stylistic Analysis of Ethel Smyth’s Sonata Cycle, Works for Piano, and Chamber Music with Piano.” DMA diss., University of Houston, 2008.

Marcus, Jane. “Storming the Toolshed.” Feminist Theory 7/3 (Spring 1982): 622-640.

Mercier, Anita and Susan Pickett. “Ethel Smyth: String Quartet in E minor (1912).” In Women Composers: Music Through the Ages, Vol. 8: Large and Small Ensembles, ed. by Sylvia Glickman and Martha F. Schleifer, 303-307. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2006.

Millington, Hannah. “’1910’: Ethel Smyth’s Unsung Suffrage Song.” The Musicology Review 10 (November 2021): 55-76.

_____. “‘An Individual, not an Echo’: Identity and Expression in the Early Works of Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944).” PhD diss., Dublin City University, 2024.

Nelson, Trevor. “The Dissident Dame: Alternative Feminist Methodologies and the Music of Ethel Smyth.” MA thesis, Michigan State University, 2016.

Neules-Bates, Carol, ed. Women in Music: An Anthology of Source Readings From the Middle Ages to the Present. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1982.

O’Toole, Sean. “The Letters of Ethel Smyth to Edith Somerville, 1918-1921: A Chronicle of Desire.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 29, no. 2 (2020): 253-280.

Robinson, Suzanne. “Smyth the Anarchist: Fin-de-siècle Radicalism in The Wreckers.” Cambridge Opera Journal 20, no. 2 (July 2008): 149-179.

St. John, Christopher. Ethel Smyth: A Biography. London: Longmans, 1959. With appendices by Edward Sackville-West, Vita Sackville-West, and Kathleen Dale.

Schau, Kate. “‘This is No Leave-Taking’: Autobiography and Legacy in Ethel Smyth’s The Prison.” Master’s thesis, University of Oregon, 2022.

Seddon, Laura. British Women Composers and Instrumental Chamber Music in the Early Twentieth Century. London: Ashgate, 2013.

Shannon, Mary. “Dame Ethel Smyth and The Prison: Gender, Sexuality and the ‘Bonds of Self.'” Honors thesis, William and Mary College, 2021.

Smyth, Ethel. Beecham and Pharaoh. London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd., 1935.

 _____. Female Pipings in Eden. London: P. Davies Ltd., 1934.

 _____. A Final Burning of Boats. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1928.

 _____. As Time Went On … London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1936.

_____. Impressions That Remained, vols. I and II. London: Longmans, Green and Co., Ltd., 1919. Reprint New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946.

_____. Inordinate (?) Affection: A Story for Dog Lovers. Cresset Press, 1936.

_____. Maurice Baring. London, William Heinemann Ltd, 1938.

_____. The Memoirs of Ethel Smyth. Abridged and introduced by Ronald Crichton, with a chronological listing of works compiled by Jory Bennett. New York: Viking Press, 1987.

_____. Streaks of Life. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1921.

_____. A Three-Legged Tour in Greece. London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1927.

_____. What Happened Next. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1940.

Solie, Ruth A., ed. Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Tovey, Donald Francis. Essays in Musical Analysis: Vol. V, Vocal Music. London: Oxford University Press, 1937.

Vysin, Elizabeth. “The Cello Sonatas of Dame Ethel Smyth: A Musical Analysis with Social and Feminist Commentary.” DMA diss., The Hartt School, University of Hartford, 2023.

Wiley, Christopher. “Ethel Smyth, Music and the Suffragette Movement: Reconsidering The Boatswain’s Mate as Feminist Opera.” In Women’s Suffrage in Word, Image, Music, Stage and Screen: The Making of a Movement, ed. by Christopher Wiley and Lucy Ella Rose.  Routledge, 2021.

_____. “Ethel Smyth, Suffrage, and Surrey: From Frimley Green to Hook Heath, Woking.” Women’s History: The Journal of the Women’s History Network, Special Issue: 1918-2018 2, no. 11 (2018): 11-18.

_____. “A Fresh Start and Two (More) Portraits: Theatrical Shows on the Life and Work of Ethel Smyth for 2018.” Women’s History: The Journal of the Women’s History Network, Special Issue: 1918-2018 2, no. 11 (2018): 39-40.  

_____. “Music and Literature: Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf, and ‘the First Woman to Write an Opera.’” The Musical Quarterly 96 (2013): 263-95.

_____. “The Statue of Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) in Dukes Plaza, Woking.” Women’s History Review (2022): 1-11.

_____. “’When a Woman Speaks the Truth About Her Body’: Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf, and the Challenges of Lesbian Auto/Biography.” Music & Letters 85 (2004): 388-414.

Wood, Elizabeth. “Gender and Genre in Ethel Smyth’s Operas.” In The Musical Woman, Vol. 3, ed. by Zaimont, Overhauser, and Gottlieb. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991.

______. “Lesbian Fugue: Ethel Smyth’s Contrapuntal Arts.” Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. by Ruth A. Solie. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.

______. “On Deafness and Musical Creativity: The Case of Ethel Smyth.” The Musical Quarterly, 92 (2009): 33-69.

______. “Performing Rights: A Sonography of Women’s Suffrage.” The Musical Quarterly, 79, no. 4 (1995): 606-643.

______. “Sapphonics.” In Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. by Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary Thomas. New York: Routledge Press, 1994.

_____. The Story of Two English Rebels, Vernon Lee and Ethel Smyth. Uploaded to YouTube by NYU Florence, March 12, 2018. https://youtu.be/xv6-AmItedc

_____. “Women, Music, and Ethel Smyth: A Pathway in the Politics of Music.” The Massachusetts Review 24, no.  1 (1983): 125-139.

Yatsyuk, Sofia. “Women Composers and Their Critics in the Era of First-Wave Feminism: Gender and the Classical Music Canon in Britain, 1850-1950.” DMA diss., McGill University, 2024.

Zigler, Amy. “Four Romantic Chamber Works by Ethel Smyth (1858-1944).” Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music 14, no. 1 (2008): 8-14.

_____. “‘Perhaps what men call a sin…’: An Examination of Ethel Smyth’s The Prison.” In Women Composers in New Perspectives, 1800-1950: Genres, Contexts, and Repertoire, ed. by Mariateresa Storino and Susan Wollenberg, 213-234. Turnhout: Brepols, 2023.

_____. Review of Ethel Smyth’s Serenade in D major for Orchestra, edited by John L. Snyder (A-R Editions, 2021), Nineteenth-Century Music Review (published online 6 September 2022). https://www.doi.org/10.1017/S1479409822000325.

_____. Selected Chamber Works of Dame Ethel Smyth. PhD diss., University of Florida, 2009.

_____. “’What a Splendid Chance Missed!’: Dame Ethel Smyth’s Der Wald at the Met.” The Opera Journal 54, no. 2 (December 2021): 109-163.

_____. “The Wreckers Storms Houston!” Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy, https://wophil.org/the-wreckers-storms-houston/

_____. “‘You and I Will Be Like the Monk Dante Meets in Hell’: Literary References and Autobiography in Ethel Smyth’s Sonata in A Minor for Violin and Piano, Op. 7 (1887).” In Nineteenth-Century Programme Music: Creation, Negotiations, Reception, ed. by Jonathan Kregor, 233-255. Turnhout: Brepols, 2018.