'Art and Suffrage'

Anyone with an interest in the history of women's suffrage in the UK will surely have come across historian and writer Elizabeth Crawford. Her two key books, The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Regional Survey and The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide are indispensable to anyone interested in researching the women who campaigned in their own area... and were absolutely essential tools when researching my own recent book, The Women Who Built Bristol (to which Elizabeth also generously contributed several entries).

As well as these reference guides, Elizabeth has authored a number of other books, and the one that I recommend to absolutely everybody (if you're only going to pick one) is Campaigning for the Vote: Kate Parry Frye's Suffrage Diary, which I wrote about a few years ago upon publication. You can also watch a video of Elizabeth talking about Kate here (and see the back of my head throughout, sorry about that!).

Now, published in February to coincide with the centenary of when (some) women received the vote, Elizabeth has published Art and Suffrage: A Biographical Dictionary of Suffrage Artists. 

This beautiful, fully illustrated new book covers the lives of more than 100 suffrage artists (mostly women), many of whom I did not previously know about although their artworks were largely familiar to me. So it was truly fascinating to read the stories about the people who created these important pieces of suffrage propaganda and merchandise, and to read about how these artworks came to be and the reasons behind them. It adds a whole new level to my understanding of the imagery of the suffrage campaign. Because, of course, it is hard to imagine a political campaign that was more visual than the suffrage one.

You can visit Elizabeth's website here, and her publisher's website here to buy the book. 

'Mollie on the March'

'Mollie on The March' by Anna Carey

Hurrah, Mollie Carberry is back! You may recall that last November I wrote on the first instalment from YA writer Anna Carey about the schoolgirl suffragette in Dublin. The good news then was that Anna was close to finishing the second book in the series, and the better news is that now that book - Mollie on the March - is published. 

Picking up where The Making of Mollie left off, Anna reunites us with our teenage shero who is still fired up from secretly painting a postbox with suffrage slogans alongside her best friend Nora. This time, Mollie and Nora are keen to be even more militant in their actions and to join Mollie's big sister Phyllis and her suffragette friends on marches and demonstrations when Prime Minister Asquith makes his visit to Dublin. Except, in the new book, Mollie and her crew get into far bigger and more daring but exciting scrapes.

Adding a fly to the ointment is Nora's wretched goody-two-shoes cousin Grace, who we met in the first book as a nuisance at school. This time, Grace has come to stay with Nora for the summer... and Nora and Mollie are determined not to let Grace find out about their suffrage plans for fear she will stop them taking action. Although there's a new side to Grace that readers may not be expecting...

As before, Anna uses real historical events as the basis for her storytelling, as well as peppering a few real-life characters into the background. And as before, the overall effect is one of magically capturing the moment and enveloping her reader in the scene.

I hope we see more books about Mollie and Nora in the future. Bravo, Anna!