ABSTRACT
In 1886, just before the start of that year's Three Choirs Festival, Constantia Ellicott, wife of the Bishop of Gloucester, wrote to A. M. Broadley, a local music enthusiast: I shall be most happy to see you after the oratorio on Tuesday afternoon. This chapter explores the idea of professionalism in the late Victorian and Edwardian British musical world and what it meant for women musicians, focussing on Oliveria Prescott, Rosalind Ellicott and Rosabel Watson well-known and respected while they were alive but little-known today. By the late nineteenth century an amateur musician was often not regarded as having the same seriousness of purpose or level of ability as the professional. The career of Rosabel Grace Watson demonstrates the variety of music-related enterprises that a professional woman in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries could embrace. The achievements of all three women challenge assumptions about male dominance of the music profession in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
