Beecham and Pharoah: Thomas Beecham (Fantasia in B # Major). Egypt before England's exodus (A fragment of autobiography) by SMYTH, Ethel, D.B.E., DMus., etc - 1935

London: Chapman and Hall Ltd, 1935. Very Good. FIRST EDITION. 8vo, with b/w frontis. Original buff cloth, decorated and lettered in red. Bruising to extremities. Doreen Cleaver's oval, chestnut gilt-stamped ex libris to front pastedown, pencil price to rear pastedown. Else, pleasingly clean and tight. In the original illustrated dust jacket: price-clipped, creased and chipped, numerous losses, closed tears, joints tender, crude PO taping to reverse. Unusual in the trade, especially in the scarce original dust jacket. Very good/ fair Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), flamboyant English composer, memoirist and Suffragette, is perhaps best remembered for composing the Women's Social and Political Union's rousing anthem, 'The March of Women' (1911). While she was the first female composer to be awarded a Damehood, her loss of hearing in the early C20th, led her to invest her prodigious energies in writing (alongside golfing). Of Smyth's autobiographical works, Vita Sackville-West wrote: "she might have entitled her successive books ME ONE, ME TWO, ME THREE, and so on [...] All Ethel's books are about Ethel, from one point of Ethel's view or another" (Raitt, 1988). The second half of Beecham and Pharoah focuses on Ethel in Egypt, where Smyth travelled "in search of peace from the suffrage battle and her constant worry over Mrs Pankhurst's safety as she undertook repeated hunger strikes" (ODNB). Smyth wrote her opera The Boatswain's Mate in Egypt and "embarked on various adventures, including the laying-out of a nine-hole Golf Course in the Nubian Desert, and the investigation of an Hermaphrodite" (front flap blurb). Suzanne Raitt, 1988, 'The tide of Ethel': Femininity as narrative in the friendship of Ethel Smyth and Virginia Woolf. Critical Quarterly.