Resources in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library: The Ella Mary Leather Manuscript Collection

The character of the folklorist Ella Mary Leather (1874–1928) has remained something of an enigma, a curious fact, considering the importance of her seminal study The Folk-Lore of Herefordshire (1912), her work with Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and the role she played in the use of the phonograph for documenting traditional song. The purpose of this article is to look at the possible reasons why this situation came about, and, by providing a provisional list of the songs that she collected, to go some way towards redressing the balance.