Britten and Pears had astonishingly hectic professional lives. Outside of Britten’s composing commitments and Pears’s singing career, they had a busy schedule of touring together as a recital duo, premiering operas, and putting on the annual Aldeburgh Festival. Their closest companions formed an enduring core over the years that was of great personal importance to both men. They had their own individual friends, but their most regular holiday companions and, at times, housemates were friends of them both. For the most part, it is striking that many of these friends were heterosexual couples and ‘conventional’ family units, although their circle did embrace gay friends Colin Graham, William Plomer, and Basil Coleman. The couples they both worked and holidayed with included John and Myfanwy Piper, Erwin and Sofie Stein – parents of Marion Stein, later Lady Harewood – and the flamboyant Russian couple Mstislav Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya. This chapter introduces these close companions, among many others, and the extent to which they provided a nurturing and creatively stimulating circle of friends to Britten and Pears.

The authors summarise the collaborative work of Benjamin Britten (1913–76) and, in turn, artist John Piper (1903–92) and choreographer John Cranko (1927–73). Britten relied on having an early visual conception of whatever dramatic work he was undertaking. Piper’s work as a stage designer was therefore a crucial part of Britten’s creative process, as specific examples in this essay demonstrate. Britten’s inexperience with dance meant that in his largest collaboration with Cranko, the full-length ballet The Prince of the Pagodas (1957), he leaned to an unusual extent on the choreographer for the overall conception and even for the character and length of individual numbers. Both working relationships reveal the extent to which Britten’s creative process was fuelled by collaboration.

The origins of this book lie in collaborative discussions with a group of feminist criminologists, sociologists and psychologists: the Criminal Women Voice, Justice and Recognition Network (CWVJR) who came together to develop research and scholarship which aims to centre women's voices and lived experiences. This book draws on each co-author's body of research in their field of expertise and on a range of research projects, practice and activities. As such the aim of this book is to bring together a body of feminist research on ‘criminal women’ that critically examines women's reasons for engaging in ‘criminal’ activity and the challenges they face in ‘attempting to become women of their own making’ (Carlen et al, 1985: 1).

The authors were inspired by Pat Carlen's 1985 landmark book made up of four biographical accounts written with four women – Chris Tchaikovsky, Diana Christina, Jenny Hicks and Josie O’Dwyer. ‘Criminal Women tells the stories of four women who, in attempting to become women of their own making, became deeply involved in crime’ (Carlen et al, 1985: 1). Using the narrative/biographical accounts by the four women, Carlen challenged both the ‘othering’ of women who commit crimes and explanations that suggest women should adapt themselves better to social norms. Following the work of Heidensohn (1968) and Smart (1978), Carlen analysed women's experiences, paying attention to ‘the complex and concealed forms of oppression and social control to which women are subject’ (Smart, 1978, cited in Carlen et al, 1985: 6) and explores the possible options and responses for women in the context of a ‘class riven and deeply sexist society’ (Smart, 1978, cited in Carlen et al, 1985: 6). Similarly, this book is centred on a biographical approach to criminology and a commitment to creating space for women's voices to be heard and shared. Using Carlen's pioneering text as our starting point, some 35 years later, our aim was to critically examine the experiences and narratives of women in the criminal justice system (CJS) based upon extensive empirical research and narrative interviews with women. Through exploring the complexities of social disadvantage in terms not only of gender, but of the intersecting experiences and oppressions of class, race and age, we aim to show how unhelpful gendered stereotypes of victims and offenders result in injustice.

A reviewer of Britten's 1943 work Rejoice in the Lamb, based on Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno (1759–63) remarked that ‘Mr Britten has a way of choosing the most recondite texts to set to music’. Even as a young man, his textual choices for his songs and choral works were, as Neil Powell writes, ‘randomly eclectic’ and ‘the sheer oddness of the poems … would often serve him surprisingly well when he came to set them to music’. Britten also had a lifelong taste for ‘anthology’ works (Peter Porter has written that ‘the Nocturne … and the Serenade are excellent pocket anthologies’), which partly explains his catholic choices, as well as the sheer number of poets involved. Boris Ford notes that Britten set texts by around ninety poets, but in fact across the complete range of his vocal and choral works Britten set the words of over 150 writers in his lifetime, including the fifty-six different authors he set as a child. Britten's total far outstrips those of his contemporaries or recent forebears. Vaughan Williams made use of just over forty; Lennox Berkeley about the same; while Walton and Tippett set the texts of only around fourteen writers apiece. This comparison needs to be qualified by a reminder that Britten wrote considerably more vocal works than any of these other composers, largely because of his muse of many decades, Peter Pears. But it is not entirely because of Pears. Britten's productivity throughout his life resulted from a lifelong search for inspiration in a text, as well as in a voice.

Britten's eclecticism might suggest he had no preference for any particular writers, unlike that demonstrated by the other composers listed here, such as Vaughan Williams’ pronounced attachment to Walt Whitman. Britten's taste for collected anthologies of poetry introduced him to groups of poets rather than specifically to one poetic voice; and, as indicated above, his adventurousness in his choices of text is widely accepted. Nonetheless, as a mature composer he did demonstrate an increasing fondness for a certain type of poetry – or rather, for the poetic tastes of his childhood, which, judging by the nature of the material to which he was exposed in 1920s Lowestoft, were texts that cannot really be considered ‘recondite’.

This chapter is about “selves”: what constitutes a self, how we might locate it, and whether it is possible at all. It is also about Benjamin Britten, although while my topic is “Britten,” for the most part I shall concern myself with how the subject of “Britten” is created, communicated, absorbed, and investigated further; and shall be particularly interested in the reasons for any such investigations. My title comes from another writer's search for a musico-biographical subject: one Lady Grace Wallace, who translated Ludwig Nohl's The Life of Mozart into English and who wrote her own fervent introduction to the volume. Her preface includes the following statement within a discussion of Mozart's various genres:

Mozart inspired some extraordinary biographical outpourings, particularly in the nineteenth century, a great many of which were imbued with a sense of loss at the tragically early death of such a shining musical genius, and Lady Wallace's preface is no exception. But at the same time she does a curious thing here: she looks at the piano concertos and finds, to her mournful regret, only the ghost of Mozart. Yet she herself has killed him off by declaring it impossible that the piano concertos can truly be “heard” now that Mozart is dead. Not only have we lost Mozart: his music doesn't even stand a chance.

She may be overstating her position. But she undeniably experiences a sense of melancholy in envisaging a dead artist and his “traces” in a work; and despite his death being just over forty years ago, the same can be (and is) felt about Britten. However, unlike Mozart, whom Lady Grace could never have heard anyway (she was born some fifteen years after the composer's death), “Britten” can easily be accessed in recordings and in film. Yet even though we can hear “the man himself” in the music and in his spoken words, he is – nonetheless – no longer alive.