WSPU Summer Festival, 1913

Contextual Note:

This work has grown from my research on the WSPU’s militant suffrage campaign in Britain, specifically the life of Kitty Marion‒ a crucial yet under-remembered figure in the movement. The main thrust of my novel will cover the years of heightened violence‒ 1912-1913 ‒however the first chapter in this submission goes back to Kitty Marion’s childhood, a time when she was still Katherina Maria Schäfer: a lone, 15-year-old German migrant on the ferry to Harwich. 

Between the years 1886 and 1913, Kitty builds up a moderately successful career on-stage in music halls and theatres all around Great Britain. Kitty wrote an autobiography which was only published in full in 2019. This has formed the backbone of my research. I have taken the events of her life and worked them into a narrative, rather than lifting description or dialogue verbatim.

Kitty comes from a middle-class family, yet never marries and becomes financially independent from a young age. She joins the WSPU in 1908 after attending a rally in Hyde Park on ‘Women’s Sunday’. Katherina had a traumatic childhood at the hands of her father. This, coupled with abuse and exploitation by her acting agents, forms the main impetus for her involvement in the campaign for the Vote, which she believed would be a means to fight issues such as sexual/child abuse and financial exploitation. As a militant WSPU campaigner, she instigated several arson attacks and was considered one of the most dangerous women in the country by Asquith’s government. These chapters depict Kitty as a militant, talking with fellow militants at the WSPU’s Summer Festival in Kensington, and then carrying out an arson attack on the Hurst Park Racecourse in Richmond. The arson chapter cuts off on a cliff-hanger at around the halfway point.

Aside from Kitty Marion, the characters of Emily Wilding Davison, Mary Leigh and Clara Giveen are all also real. I found out via Kitty’s autobiography that she spoke with Emily the day before her widely-renowned actions at the Epsom Derby, although Kitty does not go into detail. The arson attack was carried out four days later in Emily’s honour. Ilse Brightwell is, however, a figment of my imagination drawn from passages in the autobiography where other ferry passengers showed a concern for Kitty’s welfare.

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3rd June, 1913 

“I’m thinking of making a protest.” Emily’s words land abruptly between the three of them.

Mary pauses, cup halfway to lips. 

Kitty arches an eyebrow. Making a protest, isn’t that all they ever do? 

In the hall, waitresses mill around with businesslike grace, carrying trays laden with tea sets and cakes to the eager customers. Their green high-necked dresses and white muslin aprons could look clinical if it weren’t for the purple ribbons fixed around their waists. A few have pinned pristine white flowers in their hair. The mood, aside from their little table, is buoyant. Most of the waitresses are smiling. 

Kitty’s attention turns back to the table. She looks Emily in the eye.

“My dear, you’ll have to be more specific,” Kitty lowers her teacup delicately onto its saucer. She’s had twenty-seven years to grow accustomed to these English habits.  

Above Kitty’s head, purple, white and green banners flutter from the rafters, streaming with ribbons. The colours are everywhere. She leans back and tunes in to the vibrant hustle and bustle of the bazaar. Laughter and chatter rise above more hushed and conspiratorial exchanges. To her left, a group of young women sit huddled around a map, heads almost touching. Towards the back of the tea-room, a group of upper class ladies’ pale necks groan under the weight of their extraordinary hats. At another table, a group of plainly-dressed women converse in the no-nonsense drawl of the East End. So many processions, depositions, marches, speeches, festivals; every time they gather, it’s astonishing. Over her friend’s heads, she can see clusters of schoolgirls pulling at each other’s sleeves so as not to lose each other in the throng. Maybe they’ve begged the entrance fee from their fathers that morning, claiming a forgotten field trip to Kew Gardens. They can’t have seen so many women in one place before, free of men. They must be overwhelmed.  

Emily has been quiet, but now her reply seems to burst from within. “Something dramatic. Something unforgettable. Something to make those bastards at Westminster really sit up and take notice.” 

“What are you planning?” Kitty asks. Her thoughts flash to the postboxes. To the severe burns up those postmen’s arms. It was all over the papers. An outrage, they said. That one wasn’t Emily’s work, it was up in Dundee. But the risks are the same every time.

Emily looks from her fingers to Mary, then Kitty, then back to her hands. They’re clutching her cup, knuckles turning the colour of aged plaster. Kitty wonders whether it will survive the assault. She imagines a brittle hairline fracture splitting and shattering. 

“I keep thinking about how the King will be there, and his wife. Standing in their box, surveying their fiefdom.” Emily’s lip curls, “We need a great tragedy. Every year, a new bill dies, and they do nothing. All the while, the Kaiser’s busy polishing his Dreadnoughts. We’re running out of time, and we have nothing to show for it. Nothing.” 

Her trembling threatens to swirl tea into her saucer like a Channel storm. Kitty sends a hand over the tablecloth in a rescue attempt. An awkward few seconds tick by. Mary looks at Kitty, cocks her head, eyes pleading say something. Kitty sighs.

“I know, Pem. We’re all tired of waiting,” Kitty uses her friend’s nickname to get her attention. Emily looks up. 

Kitty, encouraged, goes on. “We’re not young anymore. We can’t keep doing this forever,” she gives Emily’s hand a friendly squeeze, thinking back to her last great tragedy. A thirty-foot drop from the interior balcony of Holloway prison. A desperate protest, or a cry for help? They know, everyone knows, how she sometimes draws her curtains and doesn’t come out for days. She would never ask for help, but members still leave shopping at her door.  

Emily’s a ticking time bomb, Kitty thinks. She can see the headlines already: hysterical, crazed terrorist. But it doesn’t matter what they do, the words stay the same. 

“I have to disrupt the race.” 

That much Kitty could have guessed. So she asks another question. 

“How?” 

Emily doesn’t reply. Either she doesn’t know yet, or she doesn’t want to say… Kitty hopes it’s not the latter. And she doesn’t look well. Pale, worn. She’s left her head bare today. It’s better not to ask if she’s sold another of her summer hats. 

Mary, across the table, is hiding behind her teacup. Kitty tries and fails to catch her eye. She’s never been particularly tactful. But Kitty doesn’t know what to say, either. Didn’t they all swear to lay down their lives for the Cause? How far is too far? Kitty breathes out in frustration. 

“Pem, you’ve done enough.” Mary finds her voice.  

Emily shoots her a look. “It will never be enough. Not until the vote is ours.” 

“Nobody’s telling you to stop altogether. But you need some time to recover.” Mary’s warming to it now. 

Kitty nods in agreement. Militancy may unite them, but she’s not going to encourage her friend’s recklessness. Not this time, at least. The Cause is devouring Emily. Since Holloway, they can all see how her spine torments her. How she walks, hunched, like a woman twice her age. 

“I am as well as I need to be, Mary.” 

“They stopped paying you ages ago, Pem. They cut you off. They don’t listen to us. Why persist?”  

Kitty wonders who is meant by ‘us’.  

“You know I’m not doing it for the Pankhursts anymore,” comes Emily’s curt reply. 

“Neither am I. But who do you think will wade in afterwards? If you trust us, then you need to tell us what’s going on. Maybe we can help.” 

“I don’t think you can. Not this time, Mary. I’m sorry.” 

Kitty has been watching the exchange, eyes darting back and forth. But now she chooses her words carefully: “By all means, Pem, make a scene tomorrow. But we worry about you. We need you.” They need her alive.

A butter knife would be useless at cutting the atmosphere, it hangs so thickly. The women shift in their seats. A waitress comes to collect their empty teacups. Kitty and Mary look at Emily. Emily looks at nothing in particular. 

“I do not shrink from sacrifice,” Emily eventually replies. Her hands are in her lap now, wringing a handkerchief to death. 

Kitty can’t keep herself from thinking the word. Suicide. The mortal sin. A crime. None of them give a fig for legality, but this is something else entirely. Her heart clenches. Could she do it? Kitty has an image of Emily throwing herself from the grandstand, then one of a galloping horse. She squeezes her eyes shut. She doesn’t know if Emily could do it, and that scares her most of all. Not really knowing if she knows her friend.

Emily retreats back inside herself. She won’t broach the subject again. Kitty makes a few failed attempts at drawing her out. As usual, she has spoken so well yet said very little. Mary has her elbows on the table and is rubbing her temples.

 Talk slowly turns to innocent subjects, to the festival around them; they bury their misgivings under chit-chat. The Actresses’ Franchise League’s performance, the verdant setting. Kitty has been meaning to visit the haberdashery all day. Sweat has been pooling under her collar. She needs a new summer frock, but she hasn’t had work- paid work, not suffrage plays- in months. Earlier that day, Emily and Mary had laid a wreath in front of the statue of Joan of Arc. Emily brightens up at the memory, and proudly recants the words carved into its base: “Fight on, and God will give victory.”  

Eventually, Kitty makes her excuses and says her farewells. Mary pays for their tea. She used to be a schoolteacher, until the headmaster found out about her after-school activities. Luckily, her husband didn’t cast her out. Kitty wonders how they’re getting by. Her own savings are dwindling, and Emily’s threadbare dresses also tell a story.  

Mary excuses herself to go to the washroom. Kitty is passing Emily’s chair when she reaches out and grabs Kitty’s wrist. Emily presses a small, green purse into her friend’s palm. 

“For munitions,” Emily hisses. 

“Pem! What on ear-” 

“Take it.” 

“Where did you get this? Keep it!” What on earth is she up to? 

“Take it.” She’s clearly not in the mood for dissent.  

Kitty relents and tucks the purse into her dress pockets just as Mary reappears, threading around the crowded tables. 

On her way out, Kitty almost walks past the haberdashery, but then a white silk scarf catches her eye. Someone has embroidered it with a border of delicate violets and Votes for Women. It costs more than she used to earn in a week, back when mainstream theatres did not baulk at employing her. Careful not to look into the little green purse, she reaches for her own, opens it, and finds a few pennies for some plain fabric she can transform. She’s tired of hoping they’ll make her a paid campaigner. Her mind turns to the women who stand at Whitechapel corners, barefoot and desperate.  

She pushes her way through the crowd. The Empress rooms have been transformed into a summer garden, with borders of pergolas and rambling pink roses. The scent is cloying. Noise echoes around the high-ceilinged hall, and she’s starting to feel dizzy. She impatiently passes stalls selling buttons, jewellery, hats, stationery, sweets, books, tea sets, even board games. There is nothing these women’s hands cannot shape.  

A minute later, she bursts out onto the street. The early summer sunshine feels dazzlingly bright. Kitty breathes deeply. For a woman who spends so much of her time locked in crowds, she wishes she minded it less.  

She touches the statue of Joan of Arc as she passes, for luck. God save the women with nothing to lose. 

Book Review: May Sinclair’s ‘The Tree of Heaven’

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

A testament to its era, Sinclair’s 1917 modernist classic has recently been re-printed by the British Library.

I can understand why Sinclair has been called ‘the readable modernist’. Think Victoria Woolf but instead of taking three pages to describe one action, Sinclair only takes one. I appreciate Woolf for what she did for literature and women in general, but I can’t read Woolf. I can read Sinclair though.

I bought this book for its references to the Women’s Suffrage Movement, but it was also so much more than that. Since it was first published in 1917, it’s not surprising that all roads lead to war. The Suffrage Movement is one of the threads in the book, as represented through Dorothea Harrison, but it’s by no means the main thread. Sinclair also presents a fairly nuanced attitude towards the militant suffrage societies which is by no means entirely positive. She could definitely be classified as an early feminist, and was part of a writer’s suffrage society herself, but she did not condone either the violent actions taken in for the Cause or the fanatical and autocratic leadership of the Pankhursts, fictionalised in this novel as the Blathwaites.

Dorothy spends a spell in Holloway Prison, and the experience is an almost divine epiphany for her, but she also refuses to become a member of the fictionalised WSPU because it would mean giving up her individuality and having to obey the leadership. Dorothy secretly disapproves of the devout attitudes of the society’s more fanatical members, and this eventually drives a wedge between her and her best friend Rosalind. I wasn’t expecting to have my own opinions reflected so accurately in this novel. I really appreciate the militant suffragettes of the WSPU for the attention they brought to the great Cause, but the more you read about Christabel and Emmeline, the less you like them. Especially Christabel. This is why she hardly features at all in my novel, and why I’m bringing in other characters with a less fanatical attitude than Kitty Marion, to show the range of feeling and belief within the suffrage movement itself.

The book is a modernist family drama at heart. It follows one upper-middle class family, the Harrisons, over several decades. In true modernist style, it focuses intently on each character’s inner life and motivations, which is why it sometimes takes several pages to describe what must only be a few seconds of action or dialogue. It also skips and flows fluidly between narrative points of view, which is no longer en vogue in fiction. The majority of fiction these days is either written in close third or in anthology style, from the POVs of several characters but confined to individual and distinct chapters. But I actually like fluid POV in the modernist style. However, when I tried to have fluid, shifting POVs in my novel-in-progress, it was absolutely workshopped to shreds by my coursemates. So I scrapped that and I’m now writing Rebellion in close third, purely from Kitty Marion’s POV.

I loved the psychological insights Sinclair gives us into her host of characters, each searching for fulfilment within the strict confines of Victorian and Edwardian society. Frances appears the model wife and mother, but you still get a sense that she is aware of her own wasted intelligence. The children all break with tradition in their own ways. Dorothy, the only girl, does not marry because she would have to give up her identity and individual beliefs. Her would-be fiancee doesn’t believe in the Suffrage Cause, and shows himself to be a narcissist when he assumes that Dorothy’s interest in Suffrage is a ruse to rile him.

Michael becomes a poet and doesn’t marry either, despite his father’s attempts to bring him into the family wood-importing business. Nicky marries too young. He marries a fickle artist who is pregnant with another man’s child. The child dies soon after birth and Nicky manages to get a divorce from Desmond, but it is still a blot on the family name. Obviously, not as much of a blot for Nicky as it is for Desmond, because ‘reasons’ (sexism).

I’m giving this book four stars because I started to switch off towards the end. Too much is explained via letters from the Front during the First World War, and as someone who is only interested in social and political history, military history sends me to sleep. And due to its lack of extreme and competing ideologies, the First World War is much less interesting to me than the Second. WWI was a tragedy for everyone involved, and nobody was really to blame. Millions died in the grinding methods of attrition in the first war of mechanised slaughter. However, I picked this book up for Suffrage and ended up skipping the last twenty pages.

Book Review: Constance Maud’s ‘No Surrender’

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

A forgotten gem, but only if you adore Suffrage history.

First published in 1911

Synopsis

This is a book with two protagonists: Jenny Clegg and Mary O’Neil – succinctly encapsulating the two distinct halves of the militant Suffrage movement: working and middle-class women. Jenny is a young mill worker from the North, and Mary is a middle-class woman from Ireland. They both join the militant Suffrage movement of the WSPU for similar reasons: freedom and equality for women. It is repeatedly pointed out here that it wasn’t all about the Vote: the Vote was a means to an end. It was a practical vehicle to push through social reform.

This is, in some ways, more of a political treatise than a novel. There’s not a huge amount of plot arc, and most chapters are overwhelmingly composed of dialogue, which often consists solely of pro and anti-suffrage arguments. If you have a keen interest in Suffrage history, you will enjoy this book as a social document of its time. If not, you probably wouldn’t finish it. Edwardian novels were crafted completely differently than today, and the chapters which cover Jenny and her interactions with her family and community are written entirely in a Northern vernacular, which make it peculiarly difficult to read. This book is not elegant, it is prone to cliche: its main goal was to win women over to the Cause, not to craft a beautiful piece of art.

Highlights

Jenny and Mary are empathetic, if not quite ‘real’, characters. Their speeches often spill over into the unbelievable and are rather long, but this book really manages to capture the social mood of the time. There was mass unrest: general strikes, incessant militant activity, working-class people rising up against their old capitalist, landed masters. The Socialist movement was thriving, encapsulated by the character of Joe Hopton, who eventually becomes Jenny’s fiancee in a final nod to traditional sentimentalism.

These characters are more archetypes than believable vignettes of humanity- they are ‘flat’ rather than ’round’, they don’t have the many idiosyncrasies or contradictions we would expect from a modern novel. Having ‘flat’ characters is not necessarily a bad thing though, Maud gets her point across very well, using the characters as a mouthpiece for Suffrage ‘propaganda’, to call it that. It was invaluable to me as a resource to the many arguments and counter-arguments which existed at the time, and as a window into the ways in which Suffragettes spoke to politicians, ordinary men, and each other.

Lowlights

The vernacular made it slow-going at some points, although the novel would have lost something were northern, working-class mill workers talking in Queen’s English. Some of the scenes were incredibly long and so packed with dialogue I didn’t really get a sense of place. If it were up to me, I would have cut the novel by about 20%. But that’s sort of beside the point. I am glad women at the time were putting pen to paper, it has given me a wealth of insight and inspiration.

Book Review: Jenni Murray’s ‘Votes for Women’

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 2.5 out of 5.

A charming selection of Suffrage biographies which does nothing to challenge the popular narrative on the Suffrage movement.

Maybe the review by the Daily Mail on the front cover should have set alarm bells ringing?

Overview

This is a standalone extract from a much longer book – A History of Britain in 21 Women. It gives brief biographies of six women involved in the Women’s Rights and Suffrage movements from the Victorian to the Edwardian period: Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Emmeline Pankhurst, Constance Markievicz and Nancy Astor. There’s a short introduction by the author, and charming portraits of each of the women at the start of the chapters. It’s not long – only around 120 pages, and it’s a small book with a large font, so I finished it in one sitting. It doesn’t bring anything new to the table, but it’s a good introductory profile of six amazing women.

Lowlights

There’s not much regarding highlights to cover, other than it was a light and easy read and showed some depth of research. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include any WSPU radicals other than Emmeline herself, and I think there are far more interesting characters than the Pankhursts to write about. Too much has been made of Emmeline and Christabel’s contributions to Votes for Women, and the most interesting Pankhurst characters – Sylvia and Adela, are all too often shunted aside in favour of their more autocratic relatives. I’m only glad the author didn’t decide to cover Christabel – I have a lot to say about Christabel, and not much of it is good.

As a journalist, I don’t think Murray does enough to get under the skin of the historiography of the movement, especially in 2018. There has recently been a small wave of reckoning on Suffrage history – the materials, preserved by Suffragettes themselves in the early-to-mid 20th century, were often carefully vetted and audited to craft an image of the movement, and what the average person on the street will still picture if somebody were to say the word ‘Suffragette’ to them: white, middle-or-upper class, single, chaste, well-mannered and non-violent. Actually, many Suffragettes weren’t white, many Suffragettes were working class, many were married, many had active sex lives outside marriage or were employed in the entertainment industries, and many were violent. This book regurgitates the tired history of Suffrage by focusing solely on upper-middle or upper-class women, and completely omitting the radical violence of the WSPU. It was a cute read, but more needs to be done. It omits more than it tells.

Book Review: Fern Riddell’s ‘Death in Ten Minutes’

A non-fiction must-read for any angry feminist like myself.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 5 out of 5.

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Think of history as dry and dusty? Think again (along with the best cover design I have seen from any history book over the last few years)

Higlights

I have a special place in my heart for Fern Riddell. She’s part of a new wave of young, female historians who have brains and sass by the bucketload. Listening to her interview with Dan Snow on his History Hit podcast (an absolute favourite of mine) opened my eyes to Kitty Marion. The podcast is called The Violence of the Suffragettes and it’s available on Spotify if you’re interestered.

Without Riddell’s memorable monologuing in the subject, I never would have come across the Kitty Marion, and never would have settled on her for my historical fiction project at MA. Riddell opened my eyes to a more violent, racier image of the WSPU Suffragettes and I will be eternally grateful to her for it. This is her seminal work: she is the original ‘Marionist’ historian. She took the initiative of unearthing an unknown suffragette’s unpublished biography, blowing the dust off it, and blowing our preconceptions about the militant Suffrage movement out of the water.

Marion’s autobiography has since been published (and I am extremely relieved it’s available online via the UEA library). I’ve since read it cover to cover and had the same feeling as Riddell- that feeling of unearthing something absolutely extraordinary. Except I wasn’t the first to do it. Riddell’s Death in Ten Minutes is, at its heart, a biography of this formidable woman, but it is also so much more than that. Riddell was originally a sex historian, so she brings in a new take and analyses the available evidence in a different way to many Suffrage historians and second-wave feminists, who largely swept the Birth Control movement under the proverbial rug. After moving to the USA in 1917, Marion became an avid member of the American Birth Control Review (which later became Planned Parenthood). Although she had no known relationships herself, she supported women’s right to choose when and how they had sex and whether they had children.

The combined history of the Suffrage and the Birth Control movements, and indeed the historiography of the two, are extremely complex and intertwined. Many contemporary Suffragettes, subsequent Suffrage historians and second-wave feminists have taken a dim view of women’s sexual freedom, and therefore attempted to write Birth Control advocates (such as Kitty Marion) out of the history of the fight for the Vote. The Pankhursts had a narrow view of ‘correct’ and ‘upright’ womanhood. If a woman was unmarried, she was not supposed to be having sex. If a woman had sex or gave birth out of wedlock, or sold sex, she wasn’t seen as a ‘worthy’ woman with moral fibre. The white on the Suffragette banner stood for purity. Contemporary accounts of Suffragettes imprisoned in Holloway often bear a distinct flavour of prudishness or contempt towards the many sex workers also imprisoned there. Emmeline Pankhurst disowned her own daughter, Sylvia Pankhurst, for having a baby out of wedlock. Riddell proposes this tension as one of the reasons Kitty Marion’s name has largely been forgotten, despite being one of the most (in)famous and influential Suffragettes of her day.

Riddell really brings the militant Suffrage movement to life in this book. The Suffragette (note: Sufragette not Suffragist) movement of the WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union) was not about middle-class ladies making lovely speeches and chaining themselves to railings. They set bombs, they set fire to postboxes, mansions, churches. They blew up railway carriages. They put chemicals in postboxes which gave postmen severe burns. They cut telegraph wires. They destroyed public property. They attacked politicians (with hatchets). They were radicals, they were dangerous women. I cannot stress these points enough. We find these facts distasteful. We want to remember them as peaceful victims. They were not peaceful, and they were not victims. They had agency. They fought in the literal sense of the word. And there, in the middle of it all, was Kitty Marion.

Kitty Marion: The Most Badass Suffragette You’ve Never Heard Of

Since settling on the Suffragettes for my historical fiction project, reading into their lives has only proven to me how great an idea it is. This week I’ve been reading Kitty Marion’s autobiography, which has been as entertaining as it was enlightening.

I often find our modern historical and public focus on the Suffragette movement a bit distorting. Our perception of the period is too much based on the Pankhursts and the efforts of middle-class, educated women. Yes, the Pankhursts were the figureheads and forerunners of the Edwardian movement (although its roots stretch back much further), but we have overlooked the efforts of lower-class Suffragettes working at the grassroots and on the streets for too long. I think that the Suffragette’s militancy and violence is also often overlooked in our whitewashing of history. To this day, we still see female militancy and violence as something distasteful, and in our worship of the Pankhursts as icons of their time, we like to gloss over the nitty gritty, the window-smashing arson which helped to get women the right to vote.

Although Kitty Marion (Kathaerina Maria Schäfer) came from a solid middle-class background, she straddles the class boundary in an interesting way. As a music hall and theatre performer, she was self-sufficient and completely independent from the age of seventeen. She wasn’t formally educated past the age of fifteen, and she never married, so she certainly doesn’t fit the middle-class educated housewife image that we now have of the Suffragettes. I think more historical fiction needs to be written about working-class Suffragette activists to try to fill this gap in the public eye. Suffragette fiction is strangely lacking in any case- a search on Waterstones threw up only one recent novel, which, judging by the cover, situated itself firmly in the realm of the historical chick-lit.

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Katherina Maria Schäfer was born in Germany in 1871, the year of Germany’s unification as a nation state. Her mother died when she was a toddler, and her father was a moderately successful engineer. She had an unhappy childhood, although she doesn’t dwell on this much in her memoirs. She was passed between her father’s rough care and that of other relatives. Her father was emotionally and physically abusive, which helped to turn Kitty away from the attentions of men for the rest of her life. At the age of fifteen, she left Germany to live with one of her aunts in an Eastern suburb of London, probably Epping. She spent two years there as a kind of live-in unpaid skivvy, with her aunt discouraging her from leaving the house much, learning English, or finding work.

However, Kitty is anything but biddable. She is naturally inquisitive and self-motivated, teaching herself English by listening into conversations on the street and comparing German passages of the Bible with the English. After a few years of living in England, her written English is near-perfect and her accent has all but disappeared, a testament to her natural intelligence. She becomes a stage performer at the age of seventeen and begins to travel the country, finally tasting the freedom and independence she was craving. She spends years as an itinerant performer going from show to show in all corners of the UK. Her red hair and charm arouse interest in a few suitors, but she vows never to marry. After spending her childhood living under her father’s fist, she would never subject herself to a life of obedience and restriction. For the same reasons, she never has children despite enjoying their company. In short: a lesson in late Victorian badassery, when we think about how uncommon it was for a woman to travel alone, stay single and make her own money at the time, without resorting to prostitution.

Marion being badass in front of the police

Which is what we’re coming onto now. In her career as a performer, numerous managers and insalubrious types proposition her or try to force her into trading sexual favours for employment or promotion. She even has a few close calls with sex traffickers, such as a couple who promise her a shining future as an actress in Paris. Marion, kept in a state of natural innocence by her confined childhood, is shocked by this. Sexual abuse in the theatre industry is one of the reasons she turns to the Suffrage movement.

In her career as a militant Suffragette, Marion is involved in campaigning, from the innocent – selling their newspaper, Votes for Women, on street corners- to the extreme: arson and violence against property. After Emily Wilding Davidson throws herself under the King’s Horse at the Epsom Derby in 1913, Kitty and a fellow Suffragette go on a dangerous mission to set fire to the Grandstand on the racetrack at Hurst Park, a plan which both succeeds and fails. They manage to climb over the huge perimeter fence with the help of a carpet, and the pavilion burns, but they are captured the next morning. Marion also goes on window-smashing raids along Oxford and Regent street, and takes part in the heckling of Cabinet ministers outside the Houses of Parliament.

She is arrested countless times and sent to Holloway Prison, where she goes on hunger and thirst strikes which are ‘remedied’ with government-mandated force feeding, which amount to torture. A tube is forced down her nose or throat, and then various calorific liquids are poured in, resulting in immense pain and vomiting. Some women even died as a result of the torture, as some of the liquid could get into lungs and cause pneumonia. Marion underwent this procedure an astonishing 232 times. Later, she is continually released and re-arrested under the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’, after the force feeding episodes had proven themselves a PR disaster of momentous proportions for the Government. The public, largely opposed to the Suffragettes, were nonetheless incensed and shocked by these stories of invasive torture and subsequent health complications and suffering. Force feeding was largely stopped, but instead Suffragettes were released after they had weakened considerably due to their hunger striking and then re-arrested when they had regained some strength and weight on the outside.

The cycles of starvation and force feeding took their toll on her body and mind, but Marion possessed an exceptional iron resolve and continued her protests behind bars – once successfully setting fire to her furniture and bedding using the gas lighting, almost suffocating herself in the process. Ultimately, Marion’s militant activities stop at the outbreak of the First World War, along with all other militant Suffrage activism, as the Pankhursts urged mobilisation for the war effort and the futility of doing violence to property at home in the face of the mechanised slaughter of WWI.

Kitty Marion’s autobiography is a uniquely exciting and insightful source material for writing historical fiction. Some of the scenes described are just as daring and thrilling than the best of novels. Had I written a novel about this and the Suffrage movement never happened, I would be laughed off the stage. Impossible! they would say, write about something more believable!