Suzanne Robinson’s book tells the story of another Australian composer, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, who took US citizenship, but who, unlike Grainger, devoted much of her energies to opera. And whereas Grainger had earlier integrated himself with the English folk music movement and leading composers, Glanville-Hicks, through her journalism and organisational skills (in addition to her compositions), would win for herself a place at the centre of New York’s musical world.

PGH (as she often abbreviated herself) was born in 1912, in Melbourne, the daughter of a professional fundraiser who also published poetry and short stories – providing a loose template for her own attributes. Studying at the Albert Street Conservatorium, she developed her interest in vocal music under Fritz Hart, himself the composer of a string of operas. PGH soon broke open her piggy bank, she would joke, to buy a one-way ticket to Europe.

In London, she studied at the Royal College of Music, with Ralph Vaughan Williams, and there encountered another bright student, Stanley Bate. Soon she would throw in her lot with him, abandoning studies in Vienna for Paris, where a fraught relationship with the famous teacher Nadia Boulanger was balanced by the Australian Louise Hanson-Dyer of L’Oiseau-Lyre publishing some of her music. Not long after, following a short return to Australia, the couple headed for New York, then emerging as the prime centre of modernism.

In high modernist style, PGH had her hair cropped, wore a skirt ‘of a masculine cut’ together with collar and tie and a hard-edged felt hat. (Later she took to wearing capes.) Feminist assertion was her aim, rather than expressing lesbianism; she would have few women friends. What PGH became increasingly aware of was that she would have to perform better or more tellingly than men in order to be considered a serious player. There were still many blocks to women’s advancement. As a college dean’s wife remarked to her ruefully, ‘We married what we wanted to be.’

Many creative people have not so much a fatal flaw, as Manning Clark would term it, but a central contradiction. In PGH’s case it was, as Robinson puts it, ‘her feminist nature clashing with her instinctive call to service’. Having married Bate, she put her own career on hold in order to advance his; masculinising her appearance may partly have been a strategy to make herself more attractive to him, since he was homosexual. It did not work. He beat her severely. The marriage ended, but not their friendship. Indeed, for much of her life, PGH was drawn to gay men. As she wrote apologetically to Virgil Thomson, her love occurred ‘through the mind first, and one isn’t aware of what’s happening until it’s too late to escape’. He backed away. With Paul Bowles, initially better known as a composer than as a novelist, her relationship was more enduring: there were occasional flings but more importantly a lasting affinity.

PGH owed Bowles much: she had followed him into musical journalism but declined to join him in a bohemian life in Morocco. New York had become her scene. As her friend Yehudi Menuhin noted, ‘she flowed easily’ there, ‘with her elegance, her knowledge, her wit and her natural way of being’. As a critic and organiser of composers’ concerts, she was a conspicuous figure; as someone put it, ‘a gold needle in a tray of old safety pins’. Dedicated to her composing, PGH’s was a life of relative poverty: for much of the time in New York she lived in one room. Journalism was not quite enough to live on; she was saved by occasional fellowships. (At least she had graduated to a number of affairs with straight men.)

Glanville-Hicks became the first American woman to be commissioned to write an opera, The Transposed Heads, which was based on a story by Thomas Mann (1954). Her preference generally was for melody and rhythm over harmony, and this suited the Indian subject matter, particularly at a time when performances of Indian music were unknown in the West. Her greatest triumph, though, was Nausicaa (1961), her libretto drawn from the novel by Robert Graves, postulating that the Odyssey was written not by Homer but by a Greek princess. Produced in a classical setting in Athens, the opera tested PGH’s considerable entrepreneurial talents and ate into her own money. But it was a triumph, receiving some sixty international reviews. Later there would be Sappho (1963, recorded by Toccata Classics to mark the centenary of PGH’s birth). Both operas centred on the challenges facing women as artists, an extrapolation of her own condition. Apart from The Transposed Heads, it’s the smaller works that have survived best. These include a Sonatina for treble recorder, Concertino da Camera, some early songs, and Letters from Morocco, which Robinson considers PGH’s masterpiece.

When working on Nausicaa, PGH abandoned New York for Athens, later retreating to the Greek islands. The increased tourism she hated at least made her property valuable. With helpful advice from Sir Ian Potter after their sale, she spent her last years in Sydney in unaccustomed comfort. She had become very sour about atonalism and electronic music, and in this respect Australia proved a congenial backwater. But like Christina Stead around the same time, and despite influential younger friends, PGH found the return difficult. She felt she had been forgotten. When she died in 1990, she directed that her Paddington home should be set up to provide composers’ residencies, as it has done successfully since.

Suzanne Robinson has been working on this book for many years. She has sleuthed through documents (notably PGH’s diaries), interviewed a wide range of people, and seems to have been to all the relevant places. PGH is always placed in context, while there is lucid musical analysis of the works at appropriate points. This is not only a fine biography of Peggy Glanville-Hicks; without stridency, Robinson has established her as a feminist icon.