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On Christmas Eve 1940, just three months before her death, Virginia Woolf wrote to Dame Ethel Smyth, a good friend and then-contemporary composer of opera: "Yes, I will come one day soon. Because I must exchange ideas" (Nicolson 1980, 6:454). Listening to the exchange of ideas between Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) reveals that the relationship enabledWoolf to make new connections between art and subjectivity. Encountering Smyth as an engaged intellectual and a musician, getting to know and to disagree with her, became part of Woolf s elaboration of new forms of being and writing. More specifically, Smyth was a friend and artistic colleague through whom Woolf radicalized her own ideas about subjectivity, society, and sound. Although Smyth did not influence Woolf 's musical thinking directly-Smyth and Woolf did not explicitly theorize artistic principles of music and literature-the relationship did affect Woolf 's ideas about sound and community, both of which were already prevalent in her work at the time Woolf and Smyth met in 1930. The interchange between Woolf and Smyth, therefore, reverberates in Woolf 's thinking about what constitutes both cultural and social meaning.
The first half of this paper demonstrates the effect of the relationship between Woolf and Smyth on Woolf's artistic ideas, which manifests in three primary ways: an expanded sense of subjectivity; a heightened respect for difference; and, a reconfiguration of the notion of community. Woolf's understanding of music is also surprisingly similar to the way she comprehends her friend and colleague. The second half of the paper, therefore, is an examination of how these issues-subjectivity, difference, and community-emerge in Between the Acts, as Miss La Trobe, the central character who is modeled on Smyth,1 and music become crucial components of the text. Just as Woolf listened to her friend both critically and compassionately, Between the Acts asks the reader to hear the many voices within it in order to elicit the same productive mode of communal interaction: apperceptive listening.
Exchanging/Engaging Ideas
Writing to Ottoline Morrell about Woolf in 1935, Smyth reflected,'"it seems to me that the life of intercourse is interchange'" (qtd. Marcus 1977a, 6). These comments prompt questions regarding the potential rewards such an exchange between author and composer might produce. Did this significant relationship, which...