“The Music Between Us”: Ethel Smyth, Emmeline Pankhurst, and “Possession”

ETHEL SMYTH AND EMMELINE PANKHURST In her 1933 collection, Female Pipings in Eden, which is generally regarded as Smyth's most overtly feminist work, Smyth faced the difficult task of chronicling the well-known suffragist leader and one of the founders of the wspu, her friend and comrade Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928). [...]since many women still let men set the key for them in the judging of public matters, decades may elapse before Mrs. Pankhurst is seen for what she really was -an even more astounding figure than Joan of Arc, in that instead of performing her miracles in an age of romance, religious faith, and mystic exaltation, round about her blared the hard, skeptical light of the twentieth century... "Possession" fosters an astonishing sonic realm in which themes of desire, activism, eroticism, solidarity, and sacrifice coalesce and congeal into a complex representation of intimacy -a kind of sonic meld -that illuminates the complicated ways in which women expressed their desire for other women in this era. Since Smyth remains one of the most-if not the most-avid and prolific memoirists among musicians, ignoring the interconnections between her literary and musical creations runs the risk of overlooking new ways of understanding the works of an extraordinary composer, who struggled so much to have her voice heard.