Shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2023.
When do four soloists become a quartet? When they are female composers collected together in creative tension by Leah Broad in this captivating group biography. Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clark, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen were all trailblazers in a musical world largely dominated by the works of dead white men, and Broad’s study of these remarkable composers, while full of amusing anecdotes, is quietly devastating in its portrayal of their treatment by the male establishment, then and now.