Introduction

Summary

For many, the name of Anglo-Irish composer Elizabeth Maconchy (1907–94) is completely unknown. In others, her name sparks some faint recollection, namely in connection to the musicians and composers she came into contact with, or in reference to her cycle of thirteen string quartets for which she remains best known. For those more familiar with her life and story, it remains a cautionary tale of the uphill battle facing women in male-dominated professions: regarded as one of the most brilliant students at the Royal College of Music (RCM) in the late 1920s, she rose to great acclaim in the early 1930s. The première of her orchestral suite, The Land, conducted by Sir Henry Wood at the Proms in 1930, was a smashing success and seemed destined to catapult her to stardom. But instead of opening further doors, what she encountered was discouraging in the extreme: no publisher was willing to consider publishing orchestral music by a woman composer; they would only consider songs, as the composition of miniatures better befitted her gender.

Maconchy came of age during a period of rapid change and transformation for women. The grant of partial enfranchisement in 1918, followed by The Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act in 1928, which extended the right to vote to women over the age of twenty-one, ushered in a period that some deemed a ‘watershed’ for improving the status of women. In the press, the argument that women had achieved equality with men was bolstered by the chronicling of ‘women's firsts’, insinuating that gender-based discrimination had become a thing of the past. Yet, as women gained entrance into professions from which they had hitherto been barred through the passage of The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act in 1919, which allowed women to hold civil and judicial appointments, in many other professions, marriage bars remained in full force. Of the position of women composers, in A Room of One's Own (1929), Virginia Woolf stated the following in her poignant critique of the widespread belief that enfranchisement had placed women on equal terms with men:

The woman composer stands where the actress stood in the time of Shakespeare. Nick Greene, I thought, remembering the story I had made about Shakespeare's sister, said that a woman acting put him in mind of a dog dancing.