Young and Brilliant in Florence: The Story of Two English Rebels, Vernon Lee and Ethel Smyth

Elizabeth Wood

INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR

Elizabeth Wood (née Cranwell) is a native of Australia and an independent scholar who has resided in New York since the late 1970s. She is a central figure in international and Australian musicology, and one of the founding voices in the new musicology in which she contributed pioneering work on women’s music, Ethel Smyth, feminist theory and work in queer, lesbian and gay studies. Wood studied at the University of Adelaide, graduating with Honours in English literature (1961), Honours in musicology (1970) and a PhD in musicology (1979) with a dissertation entitled ‘Australian Opera, 1842–1970’. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 1975 to study at the Graduate Centre, City University of New York, and took up the scholarship in 1977. In the following year she emigrated to New York with her four young children and was joined by her partner Catharine Stimpson in raising a family that, by 2010, included eight grandchildren. In 1997, Wood won the inaugural Philip Brett Award of the Gay and Lesbian Study Group of the American Musicological Society.