The Free-Wheeler
Composer Ethel Smyth buys a new-fangled ladies’ bicycle, and scandalises the neighbours.
1894
Composer Ethel Smyth buys a new-fangled ladies’ bicycle, and scandalises the neighbours.
1894
Ethel Smyth (to rhyme with ‘Forsyth’) was a successful composer of opera and orchestral music, whose lightly-written memoirs – she was acquainted with Brahms, Grieg and several other public figures in music – were also well received. Here, she recalls her scandalous purchase of a ladies’ bicycle in 1894.
abridged
IN the Illustrated London News were to be seen pictures of wild women of the usual unprepossessing pioneer type riding about Epping Forest, and I at once decided to buy a bicycle.
Aunts, cousins, and friends were horrified ... never has the word indelicate been bandied about with more righteous conviction. But my mother said this was perfect nonsense; ‘When we are dead’ she would reply to objectors, ‘she won’t be able to keep horses, and I can think of nothing more sensible than her buying a bicycle.’ And buy one I did, and though for many a long day to come no nice women rode bicycles, I pursued my solitary course with enthusiasm.
By degrees, as we know, the thing caught on, and one day, about eighteen months later, when I met Mrs R., the arch-prude of the neighbourhood, wobbling along the high road, and beheld her fall off her machine at my feet to explain that she had taken to it in order to avoid having out the horses on Sunday, it was clear that the indelicacy ghost had been finally laid.
abridged
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate her ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
What prompted Ethel to buy a bicycle?
Illustrated advertisements in a popular London newspaper.
Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.
Ethel saw a newspaper advertisement. The picture showed a woman riding a bicycle. Ethel bought a bicycle.