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Another Side of Ethel Smyth: Letters to her Great-Niece, Elizabeth Mary Williamson
Ethel Smyth. Selected and Edited by Caroline E.M. Stone
ISBN 9781849212076
Paperback  428 pages
 
Published 30 January 2021    UK Price £19.95    US Price $27.50   

Ethel Smyth was a prolific author, including volumes of autobiographical writing, and was herself the subject of biography.
After a brief introduction to the family and social context of the letters, this volume therefore can focus on the relationship and exchange of ideas between 'ES' and Elizabeth Williamson, the grand-daughter of Ethel's eldest sister Mary Hunter.
In part thanks to her great-aunt, Elizabeth's Edwardian childhood led not to marriage but to a degree, work at the University of London Observatory, and the freedom to continue her studies in classical Greek.
In their correspondence the two women talk about books, theatre, travel, current affairs and personal philosophies, as well as friendships and family life with all their problems and rivalries and, of course, dogs. All against the backdrop of an interleaving aristocratic, political, academic, literary and business world. The letters themselves, clearly valued by Elizabeth, almost perished three times - including once after the editor of the collection had herself inherited them.
This volume is a selection, with the bulk of the collection now in the Beinecke Library at Yale.

Caroline Stone was educated at Cambridge and the University of Kyoto, Japan. She has lived and worked largely in Rome and Seville, with periods in Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and Cambridge.
Her interests include textiles, with a book and several catalogues on Chinese export embroideries published in Spanish, and travel accounts, particularly those written by people who don't normally write books - the poor, women and slaves.

 

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