Peggy Glanville-Hicks

"Filling a huge canvas with immersive detail and impressive new research, Suzanne Robinson places an Australian-born woman in New York City at the very center of American music and modernism in the 1950s-60s. As Peggy Glanville-Hicks scrambled to earn a living as a composer through hard work, raw talent, persistence and wit, she became a discerning critic and indispensable colleague of Virgil Thomson at the New York Herald Tribune. Receptive both to the new experimental music and to ancient folk idioms of India and Greece, she delighted in creating music of textural simplicity, stylistic diversity, melodic elegance and charm, especially in songs and operas (notably Nausicaa, The Transposed Heads, and Sappho). Robinson tells the story of a musical maverick and feminist pioneer: shrewd and snarly, secretive and demanding, yet loyal in love and friendship with fellow artists like Paul Bowles, John Butler, Anais Nin, and Yehudi Menuhin. No one interested in American and Australian music and feminism will be without this fascinating book.:--Elizabeth Wood, coeditor of Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology