It was on 22 April 1858 that Ethel Mary Smyth was brought forth screaming into this world. Later in life, she would maintain that she had been born on the 23rd. After all, being both a patriot and a woman of talent – no, genius – she felt it far more appropriate to share a birthday with Shakespeare, on St George’s Day. It was neither the first nor the only time that Ethel would tweak the facts of her life to better reveal what she knew to be the underlying reality: that she was exceptional.

Ethel wove a web of legends around herself all her life – without a little self-mythologising she might never have achieved the things that she did. And like all the best stories, her tales were based in truth. Ethel was born a military daughter, fourth of the eight children in Colonel John Hall Smyth and Emma Struth’s large and boisterous family. John came from a long and illustrious line of perfectly ordinary bankers, clergymen and army officers, and he meant to follow their example by living according to a code of honour and duty. He loved his family, country, God and his monarch. If he felt any one of them had been threatened or insulted, his handlebar moustache would bristle with indignation. His formidable stature was somewhat undermined, however, by his unlucky habit of mixing up his words when annoyed. His attempts to reprimand his wayward children more often ended in laughter than repentance after he had commanded the dog to stop making his son bark, or some other unfortunate slip of the tongue.

If Ethel’s musicality came from either parent, it was certainly her mother. Emma – or ‘Nina’, as she was known – had a singing voice that ‘would have melted a stone’,1 and Ethel especially delighted in her rambunctious renditions of dance tunes, thundered out on the family piano while her children whirled around the room. Nina was the paragon of a society lady. Not only was she a consummate pianist and singer, but she was also quick-witted, spoke multiple languages and always dressed tastefully in the latest fashions. As a family friend remarked to Ethel, if Nina had married a diplomat instead of a colonel, she and her dark brown eyes and thick black hair ‘would have been known and acclaimed all over Europe’. In short, she was beautiful, bright and, by the time Ethel was growing up, desperately, desperately bored. If Nina had been born a few decades later she would surely have pursued a professional career. As it was, her intelligence and personality were much larger than the world in which they were contained. This mismatch made her seem like ‘a tragic figure’2 to Ethel. Occasionally, Nina’s most melancholy moments would erupt into explosive rows with her daughter, who was nicknamed the ‘Stormy Petrel’ on account of being just as fiery and fiercely passionate as her mother. During these episodes Ethel admitted that not even their imposing home was ‘large enough to hold her and me’.3

When Ethel was born her family lived at Bourne House in Bexley,4 but the first house that she remembered with any clarity was Sidcup Place. It was a large, sprawling building, separated from the rest of the world by high brick walls enveloped in ivy, and it provided the perfect space for increasing numbers of children to let themselves and their imaginations run wild. Ethel’s fondest childhood memories involved afternoons spent chasing her older siblings Johnny, Mary and Alice through the gardens. They tore through the shrubbery that smelled of the cool dampness of spring, with bracken and leaves still crisp from winter crackling underfoot; played croquet under the never-ending shade of the acacia that seemed to bloom yellow-bright as the sun all year round; broke into the kitchen garden to steal the enticingly fragrant fruits and herbs kept behind its walls, gleefully bearing their contraband to the safety of a tree house they built in an elm tree by the duck pond. The Smyths believed fervently in the importance of outdoor life, and Ethel’s carefree childhood instilled in her a lifelong, unladylike passion for all kinds of sports, from riding and hiking to lawn tennis and golf – the only pursuits that would stand equal to her love of music.

Exploration inevitably entailed a little rule-breaking. The family pigs fascinated Ethel: if she wasn’t riding them round the courtyard and being thrown unceremoniously into a manure heap, then she was bribing the farm hands to let her watch them be slaughtered. Such antics deeply upset Johnny, who had much more conservative opinions about the way his sisters should behave than they did. When Mary and Ethel were busily engaged in vicious brawls that (allegedly) involved embedding kitchen cutlery in each other’s faces, Johnny retreated under the nearest available table. Later, Ethel was followed by three more sisters and a brother: Nina, Violet, Nelly and Bob. Faced eventually with six strong-willed sisters, Johnny admitted defeat. Women ruled the Smyth household.

When they tired of the gardens, Ethel and her band of miscreants would storm indoors, transforming various rooms into battlegrounds for their imagined wars. The gallery was a favoured venue, long enough to get up speed skidding along the floor screaming, but when more privacy was needed the group headed upstairs to the attic. This was a den of treasures. Here Ethel smoked her first furtive cigarettes (a habit that she would only kick much later in life), and discovered her father’s collection of swords and pistols that he had brought back from India.

To Ethel these weapons were just an exciting addition to their war games, but it was through her father and objects like these that she got her first introduction to imperial politics. As a military daughter, imperialism was part of the fabric of her upbringing. John had been sent to India when he was fifteen, and when he and Nina married in 1849 he was serving in the Bengal Artillery. They initially set up their family home in Bengal, moving back to England just before Ethel was born. John worked his way up the military ranks, was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel in 1858, and decorated in 1861 for his role in suppressing the 1857 Indian Rebellion,5 when Indian soldiers rose up against the British East India Company’s rule. This was a formative environment for Ethel, shaping the woman she would become. She inherited her family’s conservative political views and would forever be a staunch supporter of the military.

To accommodate their growing family, when Ethel was nine the Smyths moved west to take up an even larger house, Frimhurst, near the military town of Aldershot. Still standing today, Frimhurst was an enormous building sat between Basingstoke Canal and the railway, which provided Ethel with a favourite pastime of lobbing stones at passing trains. The orchards and expansive fields could have provided as exciting a space for childhood games as Sidcup Place, but Ethel was growing out of the reckless days of her early youth. Frimhurst marked the beginning of her passage towards adulthood and all of its complexities.

A major difficulty Ethel had to face was matrimony. The Smyths’ main hope for their six daughters was a good marriage, but Ethel never shared this vision for her future. She preferred to leave wedded bliss to her older siblings. She viewed the eldest Smyth, Alice, as a Regency relic, and mocked her mercilessly for falling into a Jane Austen-esque swoon after the first of her many proposals. And she didn’t mind when her own suitors drifted off to woo Mary instead, after they grew tired of her beating them at sports. Alice and Mary were inadvertent protectors; being the third daughter allowed Ethel more freedom than she would have had without older sisters to fulfil her parents’ marital ambitions. She showed a wild disinterest in anything that involved a maternal instinct. Dolls were her most despised toys, and she and Mary bestowed a series of increasingly severe illnesses upon them, maintaining that they needed to remain in quarantine lest their fatal diseases spread. Animals were Ethel’s preferred company. She became a formidable horsewoman, going hunting during the time that other women spent developing their needlework and building up the skills that would help them on the marriage market.

Ethel saw marriage as a restriction of her freedom. She never expressed any desire to become a mother. And beyond this, she was more interested in women than in men. The boys who tried to capture her heart aroused very little emotion on her part at all. The closest she came to marriage was a whirlwind romance with William Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s shorter-haired, bearded brother, whom she met on a trip to Ireland. Ethel was attracted to his intellectual enthusiasm, and they bonded over a shared love of poetry, philosophy, music and lawn tennis. On the ship back to England the two sat under the stars wrapped up in a blanket, debating philosophers’ relative merits, shivering slightly as they tasted the salt lingering on their lips, carried by the cold sea air. The romantic mood was broken only briefly by a seasick Ethel vomiting on William. But he was undeterred, and by the end of the voyage the two were engaged, the result of an impulsive proposal made atop a collapsing biscuit tin.