ABSTRACT
For all that Rosa Newmarch made an invaluable contribution to key aspects of English music life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we still lack the ‘book-length biography in her own right’ of which Alfred Boynton Stevenson thought her so ‘[e]minently deserving’.1 Newmarch herself began a memoir, which, when edited and published, will doubtless become a crucial source of information for details of her life, work and ideas (although, as she wrote to Henry Wood when congratulating him on the appearance of his own autobiography: ‘Someone else must do the summing-up of one’s life work’).2 AĞer her death, her daughter Elsie wrote to Jean Sibelius: ‘I hope some day it may be possible to publish a memoir of my mother, or complete her own book of memories and leĴers of which she leĞ several chapters.’3 But nearly three years later, Elsie confessed to Jessie Wood that her work had stalled – and for very personal reasons:
It is just this problem of blending, or keeping apart the private & the professional life, which has brought me to a standstill in Mother’s memoirs; for leĴers reveal unhappy, intimate & difficult domestic upheavals, years when separation hung on a very thin wire & uncertain moments which cannot be ignored in any account of her life & work.4
