Ina Boyle (1889-1967)
I think it is most courageous of you to go on with so little recognition. The only thing to say is that it does come finally.
But living out of the world, though it suited her temperamentally, had the disadvantage that she made very few musical contacts and that her music remained little known and almost unperformed.
My mother Elizabeth Maconchy was a close friend of Ina Boyle, a friendship that lasted fifty years. She wrote of her ‘Few people meeting Ina Boyle for the first time can have had any notion of what a unique and interesting person she was. Under her shy retiring manner lay a strong and independent character and an original creative mind.’
I too was lucky to know Ina Boyle, and to recognise in her the special quality which my mother described as ‘visionary’. It is a happy thing that at last Ina Boyle’s music is being rediscovered and performed.
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