She left after a year, however, disillusioned with the low standard of teaching, and continued her music studies privately with Heinrich von Herzogenberg.

[2] Upon her return to England, Smyth formed a supportive friendship with Arthur Sullivan in the last years of his life; he respected her and encouraged her work.

Smyth's extensive body of work includes the Concerto for Violin, Horn and Orchestra and the Mass in D. It was the latter's performance in London's Albert Hall in 1893 that helped her gain recognition as a serious composer.

[11][13] Otherwise, recognition in England came somewhat late for Smyth, wrote the conductor Leon Botstein at the time he conducted the American Symphony Orchestra's US premiere of The Wreckers in New York on 30 September 2007:[14] On her seventy-fifth birthday in 1934, under Beecham's direction, her work was celebrated in a festival, the final event of which was held at the Royal Albert Hall in the presence of the Queen.

[15] Smyth’s composing and conducting career came to a premature end before the 1920s as she started to develop hearing loss, which eventually led to her becoming completely deaf.

[16] Though Smyth’s four movement Serenade earned her orchestral and public debut in England, she had to change her name to the pseudonym E.M. Smith to avoid biased criticism.

On the one hand, when she composed powerful, rhythmically vital music, it was said that her work lacked feminine charm; on the other, when she produced delicate, melodious compositions, she was accused of not measuring up to the artistic standards of her male colleagues.

[22] After further practice aiming stones at trees near the home of fellow suffragette Zelie Emerson, Pankhurst called on WPSU members to break a window of the house of any politician who opposed votes for women.

Smyth was one of the 109 members who responded to Pankhurst's call, asking to be sent to attack the home of Colonial Secretary Lewis Harcourt, who had remarked that if his wife's beauty and wisdom was present in all women, they would have already won the vote.

[23][24] When Thomas Beecham, her proponent-friend, went to visit her there, he found suffragettes marching in the quadrangle and singing, as Smyth leaned out of a window conducting the song with a toothbrush.

[25] In her book, Female Pipings in Eden, Smyth said her prison experience was of being "in good company" of united women "old, young, rich, poor, strong, delicate", putting the cause they were imprisoned for before their personal needs.

[20] Smyth strongly disagreed with the support Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel gave to the war effort in 1914, but she did train as a radiographer in Paris.

Her fractious friendship with Christabel ended in 1925, and Smyth conducted the Metropolitan Police Band at the unveiling of the statue to Pankhurst in London in 1930.

At the age of 71, she fell in love with writer Virginia Woolf – herself having worked in the women's suffrage movement[26] – who, both alarmed and amused, said it was "like being caught by a giant crab", but the two became friends.

[34] Ethel Smyth featured, under the name of Edith Staines, in E. F. Benson's Dodo books (1893–1921), decades before the quaint musical characters of his more famous Mapp and Lucia series.

[38] In 2021, Smyth posthumously received a Grammy for Best Classical Vocal Solo based on the recording of The Prison by conductor James Blachly and soloists Sarah Brailey and Dashon Burton, members of Experiential Orchestra.

Charlesworth described her sculpture as: Ethel stands, wearing her usual tweed skirt, enthusiastically conducting passers-by with her over-sized baton, as presented to her at the Royal Albert Hall by Emeline Pankhurst.

Her jacket is half open, her arms are beating out the time and her eyes are full of concentration as she battles with her hearing loss, which went completely in her 50's.