Virginia Woolf, Ethel Smyth, and Music: Listening as a Productive Mode of Social Interaction

The correspondence between Virginia Woolf and Ethel Smyth reveals that Woolf's interactions with her friend reverberate in her thinking about cultural meaning. Aesthetic and social ideas that circulate around notions of music, subjectivity, difference, and community emerge from an examination of the relationship. In turn, these concepts resurface in her final novel, Between the Acts, when Woolf's thematic depiction of music becomes especially conspicuous. Woolf's representations of the sonorous art and Miss La Trobe enable her to explore alternative models of social organization. Ultimately, as Woolf listened apperceptively to her friend and colleague, the novel asks the same of the reader: to hear the heterogeneous voices of diversity.