The Smyth-Brewster Correspondence: A Fresh Look at the Hidden Romantic World of Ethel Smyth

Write to me always in veiled language as I can’t help leaving letters about, & loathe tearing up yours.

Ethel Smyth to Harry Brewster, August 2, 1895

Dame Ethel Mary Smyth (1858–1944), English composer and suffragette, wrote around a thousand letters to the French American philosopher and poet Henry B. “Harry” Brewster over the twenty-four years of their relationship; Brewster matched her letters with a similar number of his own. The collection of letters that remain tells a story of a passionate relationship developed in the difficult circumstances of a love triangle with Harry Brewster’s wife, Julia, a story that is also the focus of substantial sections of Smyth’s published memoirs.¹ However, while the version told in the memoirs has been retold again and again by scholars, the approximately two thousand unpublished letters have remained underanalyzed. This neglect seems partly to be due to the location of the letters in a private collection, the accessibility of which starkly contrasts with the readily available published memoirs. Yet the neglect of these primary sources is also characteristic of Smyth scholarship in general in that scholars have drawn little on even those primary sources openly accessible in public collections. (Elizabeth Wood’s analysis of the Pankhurst correspondence is a notable exception to this tendency.)²

Although Smyth’s published writing in her numerous volumes of memoirs has been a rich source for biographical information and for an insight into the composer’s views on music, culture, politics, feminism, and love, there is much to be gained by looking not only at this public version of events but also at the unedited, unabridged accounts of Smyth’s stories contained in her letters. This article will use the letters exchanged between Smyth and Brewster from 1884 to 1908 as a means of investigating not only their relationship but also Smyth’s broader approach to love and romance. Because of the material on which it relies, the analysis of the Smyth-Brewster correspondence that I offer presents a perspective different from perspectives offered in previous studies. In the course of my analysis of their written communications I argue that scholars’ overreliance on Smyth’s apparently candid autobiographical writing in her memoirs has resulted in a portrayal that is not sufficiently critical of the agenda behind these self-portraits. As a result, important aspects of her personal motivations have gone unnoticed. The passage from an 1895 letter to Brewster with which I opened this article could be seen as an invitation to read between the lines, an enticing hint toward the riddles that may be solved by gazing through, around, and beyond the veiled language of Smyth’s published and unpublished writing.

To analyze Smyth’s exchange of letters with one man amongst the many women recognized as central figures in her life story is to enter into a discourse about her sexuality significant to Smyth scholarship. It is worth stating at the outset that in doing so I do not mean to suggest that we should focus on this relationship above all other relationships. Nor do I mean to imply that the centrality of this relationship to Smyth’s worldview diminishes the roles of significant women such as Lady Ponsonby, Emmeline Pankhurst, Edith Somerville, and Virginia Woolf and their vital importance to Smyth’s women-centered view of the world. However, what I do mean to argue is that in its essential contribution to a period of Smyth’s life during which many of her ideas about morality and love were formed and in its longevity, the Smyth-Brewster relationship forms a window to some of the most profound and wide-ranging beliefs and motivations that remained with Smyth throughout her life. Considering that my view departs in significant ways from the views of previous scholars, I will give a summary of some of the most common approaches to Smyth’s romantic relationships before discussing what the correspondence reveals about her relationship with Brewster. I will then reflect on what some of the new findings from this correspondence reveal more...