| Summary: | This chapter explores post-suffrage militancy and intergenerational feminism in the historical interstice of the 1930s—i.e. not merely the interwar years, but in the period immediately after first-generation suffrage campaigning, and before second-wave, postwar feminism. It tackles this critical and conceptual nexus via the intense, intimate friendship of composer Ethel Smyth and Virginia Woolf, underlining the mutually beneficial, creatively invigorating, politically and poetically vibrant connections reverberating across their works—letters, broadcasts, essays, pamphlets. Pursuing the feminist revisioning of their complex collaboration first suggested by Marcus (1987: 112), it revisits post-suffrage and anti-war modulations of Smyth’s radically discomfiting feminist praxis, firing disruption into the very heart of consensual culture, to better understand how the same metaphorical arson was taken up by Woolf in her anti-fascist, anti-patriarchal, pacifist pamphlet Three Guineas.
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