This latest biographical venture on behalf of composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912–90) has been gestating at least since the early 1980s, when its subject anointed friend and Australian music activist James Murdoch as authorized biographer. It might surely be anticipated that the present volume would amplify the introduction to Deborah Hayes's thorough 1990 bio-bibliography and flesh out a figure who appears and disappears from biographies of her closest associates in the space of a line or an amusing quotation or two.Footnote ¹ It is disappointing, then, to discover that this volume's reliability is punctured by omissions, inaccuracies, and distortions. Nonetheless it is a publication worthy of a cautious welcome: an informative (and in places revelatory) monument to an enterprising and adventurous woman composer who was compelled to forsake home, family, and love for modern music.

Much new information is assembled here. Some is gleaned from personal interviews with friends such as Sidney Cowell, Joaquin Nin-Culmell, and Ned Rorem in the United States, Paul Bowles in Morocco, and Peter Sculthorpe and Joyce McGrath in Australia. Although the voluminous collection of scores and papers held at the Mitchell Library in Sydney is the principal documentary resource, Murdoch canvassed collections as scattered as the Methodist Ladies' College in Melbourne, the Royal College of Music in London, and the Rockefeller Archive Center in Pocantico Hills, New York. Access to invaluable private papers is also in evidence in quotations from correspondence with Yehudi Menuhin, the New York–based choreographer John Butler, and Indian academic and administrator Narayana Menon. All of these serve to complement and substantiate Glanville-Hicks's recollections which, by the time Murdoch recorded them, had been reformulated—even distorted—by the vicissitudes of illness and old age. (Is it creditable, for instance, that the subject once lay in wait on the pavement of rue Ballu, penning begging notes to the elusive Nadia Boulanger?)

Glanville-Hicks's zest for new music from the 1930s onwards is captured in vignettes of performances in the London underground during the Blitz, travel to Florence (not Venice [26]) to hear Pelléas (twice), and wartime emigration from the cultural backwater of Sydney to the mecca of New York—all before either she or her husband, composer Stanley Bate, turned thirty years old. It was in New York that Glanville-Hicks discovered her métier as composer, critic, and “catalyst.” The ancillary activities severely curtailed composing and for years restricted her to small genres, but she nonetheless secured performances by the likes of Stokowski, Maro Ajemian, and Walter Trampler while reviewing for Virgil Thomson at the New York Herald Tribune and, throughout the 1950s, administering the Composers' Forum. In a single letter dating from 1950, Glanville-Hicks reported to Thomson the professional and sexual exploits of many of their mutual friends: John Cage, Minna Lederman, Alan Hovhaness, Martha Graham, Erick Hawkins, Serge Koussevitsky, Ben Weber, torch singer Libby Holman, and surrealist painter Brion Gysin, clearly reveling in her own propinquity (65). Thomson was her savior and confidant, obtaining for her consecutive Guggenheim awards and consoling her over the collapse of her relationship with Bowles (one so secret that even the latest of Bowles's biographies meekly reproduces his denials of its occurrence).Footnote ² Murdoch also discloses her irrepressible wont to meddle in others' lives—for instance, persuading the Library of Congress to send a tape recorder to Bowles in Morocco, writing partisan reviews of the music of Cage, and proposing to Lou Harrison that he visit Korea as a “musical missionary” (124). Many of these enterprises succeeded merely because, as Murdoch convincingly argues, “she willed it” (142).

Sadly, the spirited and “effervescent” Glanville-Hicks was not the woman Murdoch met in 1968 (66). She was by then querulous, beset by memory loss, and nostalgic for her American friends (some of whom, like Menuhin and Harrison, visited her in Australia). Murdoch as her employer became proprietorial, and his acquaintance with a cantankerous septuagenarian skewed his ability to reconvene her heyday. He romanticizes her genius (“she knew she had some big works within her, coiled like arched snakes waiting to escape” [145]) and alleges that she possessed “a radar for musicality” (82). When he interviewed Bowles he admits he was obliged, reprehensibly, to undo Bowles's impression of Peggy merely as “a reflection of himself” (51). Despite Hayes's evidence to the contrary, Murdoch honors the claim that Glanville-Hicks's earliest Tribune reviews were published under Bowles's initials and inflates their number by two hundred. The family history as it is outlined here is preposterous: there were no earls in the closet and the Glanville name derives not from a French ancestor but from an English aunt of her father. Few of the sources are documented, too few relevant secondary sources are consulted, and disparate events are confusingly concatenated in chapters more fixated on intrigue than on the creative life.

There is precious little about the music itself or, more alluringly, the association between the life and its artifacts. Murdoch seems to relinquish this agenda on the basis that “there is little documentation available on her actual composing process, little discussion . . . of the joy she experienced in composing” (201). Yet from an early age, she wrote both poetry and music redolent of an interest in ancient civilizations (Roman, Etruscan, and Greek), and in the mythology of India, as well as a deep appreciation of poetry and fiction from Sappho to Graves. Many of her letters are poetry manqué: one to Butler from Athens is typically picturesque in its illustration of the arrival of fall, “like the curtain run up on an expected set” (155).

Many critical questions about Glanville-Hicks's achievements and their significance linger. How was the evolution from youthful composer of a quintessentially English “Jerusalem” (ca. 1931) to that of a mature opera based on Greek demotika articulated, and to what extent was the former purged in the latter? To what degree was she persuaded by her intimate acquaintance with the ethnomusicological interests of Cowell and Bowles? And, for instance, how polemical is Nausicaa (1961) intended to be, and how much does it reflect frustration with institutionalized misogyny in the United States in the 1950s, when it gratifies Robert Graves's theory that the Odyssey was written by a woman? At least the trajectory of a remarkable life has been tracked, even if the inner life seems chimerical. As Alastair Reid observes, “She just set out to have as many lives as possible, and was probably, at least, numerically, more successful than most” (152).