Quartet has been reviewed in the Guardian, New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Telegraph, Financial Times, Sunday Times, ​ The Spectatorand The SpectatorWorld, The New Statesman, Caught by the River, VANMagazineand Country Life. It has received a starred review from Kirkus, was featured in the Sunday Timesand on the QI podcast No such thing as a fish, selected as the London Review Bookshop's Book of the Week, as a book to look out for in 2023 by both the Observerand The Scotsman, and chosen by Kate Mosse as one of her top 15 non-fiction books. Although Quartet shines a bright light on the prejudices and obstacles faced by women in the music industry, it does not show them to be victims. Yet, admittedly all four women were white, English, well-educated, middle-class and all experienced some form of establishment acclaim during their careers. All, save for Clarke, were staunch Conservatives. So while we can admire their personal subversiveness, what does this tell us about the wider social, political and sexual context of both the musical and wider world of the time?

Radio 3 in Concert interval talks, from 2018 (Discussions about music by composers including Sibelius and Nielsen) Ifthis sounds like a book for classical music buffs, it isn't. If it sounds rather worthy, again, trust me, it isn't... It's fast-paced, engaging, and an absolute riotat times. I laughed out loud... Quartetis a fascinating and compellingread but, just as importantly, a hugely enjoyableone. Female “voices” and Feminism’, The Cambridge Companion to Women Composers ed. Susan Wollenberg & Matthew Head (Cambridge University Press), forthcoming Doreen Carwithen (b.1922):One of Britain’s first woman film composers who scored Elizabeth II’s coronation film, her success hid a 20-year affair with her married composition tutor . Scaramouche, Scaramouche: Sibelius on Stage’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 145/2 (2020), 417-456

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A new kind of music biography, one embellished with intimate detail and nuance not found in the hagiographies of male composers written by men... it makes for captivating reading. For me, Rebecca Clarke’s Viola Sonata is one of those pieces. I was having a miserable day and was sat in an optician’s waiting room with a migraine. I’d put on a podcast to try to distract myself from the world wavering disconcertingly around me, but I wasn’t really paying attention to it. BBC Proms, BBC Four, 29 Jul. 2022 (Expert guest for TV broadcast of the 'Sea' Prom featuring Carwithen, Vaughan Williams and Grace Williams)

And then I heard an opening theme that was so arresting that I had to stop and listen. The viola swoops and soars, confident and powerful, conjuring up a fantastical world that seems to make everything else dull by comparison. It felt like this music was speaking directly to me, personally. I was so engrossed that I nearly missed my appointment. Quartet by music historian Leah Broad is a group biography of four female classical musicians and composers — Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen — whose combined lives spanned 150 years from the 1850s to the early 2000s. All four were hugely talented and famous in their day, yet have been all but written out of musical histories which focus on their male contemporaries like Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten; to the extent they are included, they’re reduced to muses and footnotes. Quartet serves to remind us that music was never exclusively a man’s world, and that, ‘if we choose it, music histories could be filled with the notes of surprising, exciting and delightfully difficult women. It’s time their stories were told.’ Leah is a public historian at the University of Oxford. She researches twentieth century music, particularly women in music, and regularly works with performers and institutions to programme and contextualise marginalised historical figures.The lives, loves, adventures and trailblazing musical careers of four extraordinary women from a stunning debut biographer. Doreen Carwithen (b.1922): One of Britain’s first woman film composers who scored Elizabeth II’s coronation film, her success hid a 20-year affair with her married composition tutor. Rebecca Clarke, ‘one of the first female players in a professional orchestra’. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Dorothy Howell (b.1898):A prodigy who shot to fame at the 1919 Proms, her reputation as the ‘English Strauss’ never dented her modesty; on retirement, she tended Elgar’s grave alone.

If you were stranded on a desert island with only five pieces by these composers to play, which pieces of music would you take along with you?

Oliver Soden is the author of Michael Tippett: The Biography (Orion) and Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), published later this month Amanda Maier: Violin Concerto in D Minor, Piano Quartet in E Minor, Swedish Tunes and Dances; Sonata for Violin and Piano, Four Songs; Works for Piano’, 19th-Century Music Review (published online 7 May 2019), 1-5 Shakespeare in Sweden: Wilhelm Stenhammar and Modern Theatre Music', The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music ed. Mervyn Cooke & Christopher Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 479-507 BBC Radio Oxford, 29 Jan. & 1 Aug. 2019 (Introductions to classical music, comparing composers and biscuits)