The Letters of Ethel Smyth to Edith Somerville, 1918-1921

A Chronicle of Desire

Abstract

This article is the first in-depth account of the letters from the English composer Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) to the Anglo-Irish writer Edith Somerville (1858-1949). Focusing on the initial phase of the decades-long correspondence, from 1918 to 1921, when the letters were particularly impassioned and frequent, it situates this archive within the body of literature on women’s intimate friendships in England and Ireland in the early part of the twentieth century. Class privilege, education, and life among the London artistic elite allowed Smyth to lead an independent and relatively open life as a lesbian, whereas Somerville had much less opportunity as the matriarch of a Protestant Ascendancy family in rural Ireland. The letters from Somerville during this early period have unfortunately been destroyed, but the letters from Smyth alone are clearly to be read as love letters. Although Smyth’s physical attraction for Somerville appears to have been ultimately rejected, the correspondence would only end with Smyth’s death in 1944.

In addition to telling the story of this relationship in greater detail than has been done to date, the article recontextualizes Somerville’s earlier relationship with Martin Ross (Violet Martin, 1862-1915), her second cousin and co-author in the late-Victorian literary sensation known as Somerville and Ross. In doing so, it further brings the biographical disputes about Somerville’s sexuality into contact with the broader scholarly discussion of British women’s same-sex relations in this period. In turn, the chronicle of desire formed by Smyth’s letters offers an account of how unrequited passion is also a form of erotic relationship, one that has remained curiously underanalyzed. Given what we know about Somerville and Smyth and more broadly about women who loved women at the time, this correspondence ultimately reshapes our view of both women and the scholarship that has tended to privilege more obviously “successful” erotic relationships and life partnerships over more difficult limiting cases.