Elisabeth Lutyens (1906a 1983), Elizabeth Maconchy (1907a 1994) and Grace Williams (1906a 1977) were contemporaries at the Royal College of Music. The three composers' careers were launched with performances in the Macnaghtena Lemare Concerts in the 1930s a a time when, in Britain, as Williams noted, a woman composer was considered 'very odd indeed'. Even so, by the early 1940s all three had made remarkable advances in their work: Lutyens had become the first British composer to use 12-note technique, in her Chamber Concerto No. 1 (1939a 40); Maconchy had composed four string quartets of...