How would Carice have felt?

 Following on from the earlier post about Sir Edward Elgar's views on younger composers, one wonders what his daughter Carice would have felt. Would she have embraced the music of her own generation or followed the taste of her father? One suspects the latter, because she seems to have been devoted to her father, acting as hostess for him in place of her mother when Lady Elgar withdrew because of ill-health. 

Altogether, there is tantalisingly little, on the Web at least, about the life of Carice Elgar. Comfortably off as she must have been as the only daughter of a successful composer, and a linguist like her mother, she must have enjoyed travelling. She kept extensive diaries which are now in the care of Birmingham University Library but nobody has seen fit to draw even a short biography based on them.

Another key woman of music I have often wondered about was Isobel, wife of Gustav Holst and mother of Imogen, about whom a lot more is known, thanks to her work for Benjamin Britten. There was a hint that Isobel was attractive, from a reported remark about Imogen by a neighbour in Cheltenham, that she took after her father, poor dear. The publicity for Philippa Tudor's biography, published earlier this year, and a single photograph reproduced in the BBC2 programme on the friendship and collaboration of Holst and Vaughan Williams confirm the impression. Needless to say, the book is now on order.