"Miss Rivers & Miss Bridges" – by Geraldine Symons

I was tipped off about this 1970s children’s book by someone on Twitter who knew I was working my way through as many suffragette books as possible. And although Miss Rivers & Miss Bridges by Geraldine Symons (Puffin Books) is sadly long out of print, there are a fair few second hand copies available on Amazon Marketplace at very reasonable prices, so I snapped one up.

Miss Rivers & Miss Bridges is aimed at readers of around 11 years old, and follows teen heroines Pansy and Atalanta over a week in the early 1910s, when Pansy has come to stay with her friend and see the big smoke. Free-spirited Atalanta, who is blessed with a bohemian author and actress for parents, is impassioned by the suffrage movement and determined that she and Pansy will make their mark for the cause, and attract the attention of Emmeline Pankhurst.

Their determination sees them hurl a brick through a window at 10 Downing Street, dive into the Thames, cause a scene in front of the Prime Minister at the theatre, and even end up in the police cells… A busy week by anyone’s standards.

While it is, of course, entirely ridiculous that Pansy and Atalanta could get away with all this without serious repercussion, just suspend your disbelief and go with the flow of these passionate and spirited young women as they illustrate the depth of feeling that exists in people of all ages for female emancipation.

The long-running fight of our foremothers for the vote must never be forgotten, and it is important that our children are educated to know about this important part of their history. And Miss Rivers & Miss Bridges is an entirely readable and fun way of doing that.

2011: What was that all about?

Everyone else does an end of year round-up, so here’s my vainglorious stab at the thing.

FICTION BOOKS OF 2011:

Anthony Quinn – Half of the Human Race 

Maggie O’Farrell – The Hand That First Held Mine

NON-FICTION BOOKS OF 2011:

Jennifer Hayashi Danns and Sandrine Leveque – Stripped: The Bare Reality of Lap Dancing

Gary Younge – Who Are We: And Should It Matter in the 21st Century?

GRATUITOUS NODS TO BOOKS WOT I WROTE SOMEFINK FOR IN 2011:

Deborah M Withers (editor) – Sistershow Revisited: Feminism In Bristol

Sian Norris (editor) – The Lightbulb Moment: The Stories Of Why We Are Feminists

 

GIGS OF 2011:

British Electric Foundation at Camden Roundhouse, London, October

Scritti Politti at the Trinity Centre, Bristol, October

PLAYS OF 2011 (PERFORMED IN BRISTOL):

The Wild Bride at St Georges (with Bristol Old Vic)

Treasure Island at Bristol Old Vic

Plus a festive nod to Coram Boy at Colston Hall, which I’ll be seeing tomorrow and reviewing shortly (with, err, Bristol Old Vic again!)

EXHIBITIONS OF 2011:

The Glamour of the Gods – at the National Portrait Gallery, London

Sistershow Revisted at Centrespace Gallery, Bristol

MOST POPULAR MJM POSTS OF 2011 (in terms of hits):

Why Caitlin Moran and Grace Dent are never on panel shows... but should be

Laurie Penny... looking familiar

“The Suffragette” by Janet MacLeod Trotter

My ongoing mission to compile an exhaustive directory of novels and non-fiction books about the suffrage movement continues with this review of Janet MacLeod Trotter’s novel The Suffragette (originally published in 1995, but republished in 2011).

Janet has made her career writing novels, mostly historical fiction, which clearly is the category The Suffragette falls into. The novel begins at the turn of the last century, and follows our heroine Maggie Beaton on her fight for female emancipation. What immediately makes The Suffragette different from so many other novels about the movement is that it is not only set in the north of England, but also profiles a working-class protagonist.

The Suffragette is literally illustrated with such detail about the slums of Newcastle, and the degradation and filth that Maggie and her family live and work in, that it is easy to quickly become absorbed in the world Janet recreates here. And the further Maggie becomes involved in the cause for suffrage, the faster you start turning the pages to see where her story goes next. I found that after Maggie was locked up in prison, and after reading the harrowing descriptions of her force feeding, that the story really picked up pace for me and I became completely absorbed in her tale.

Perhaps this is because Janet herself has such a strong link to the suffrage movement. She explained to me in an email: “My interest in the suffragettes was sparked by family stories of my three great aunts in Edinburgh, who were all members of the WSPU, and their mother, my great granny Janet, who accosted Winston Churchill with an umbrella and shouted ‘Votes for Women’ at him! He was then in the Liberal government who were denying women the franchise.  Women got arrested for doing less, but luckily Janet was not.” This family story is paid tribute to in an anecdote near the start of The Suffragette.

Janet continued: “They also took part in the 1911 census revolt and the 1909 mass rally in Edinburgh for the Pankhursts, in which my aunties dressed up as figures from history – Mary Queen of Scots and Agnes Bar-Lass (both Scottish heroines). In the early 1990s, we moved to Morpeth and lived near the grave of Emily Davison, the great suffragette martyr, and it was researching more about her that spurred me on to write the novel.  I wanted to highlight that there had been plenty of women outside London who fought hard to win emancipation.”

There are a lot of twists in the novel and I won’t spoil them, but I’d urge you to read Janet’s book and find out for yourself. There were quite a few areas where I really started racing through the pages to find out what happened as soon as I could, and also quite a few places where I seethed with rage on Maggie’s behalf. The Suffragette is a very convincing and vital novel on this topic.

As well as being for sale via Amazon and Janet’s website, you can also buy an e-book of The Suffragette. Please visit Janet’s website for more information about the author and her other books.

Dorothy Whipple – ‘Greenbanks’

Dorothy Whipple, taken from Persephone's website

If you don’t yet know who Dorothy Whipple is, you’re really missing something special and I suggest you hot click it to the Persephone Books website – as they are steadily republishing this once-forgotten author’s back catalogue.

Greenbanks is the seventh Dorothy Whipple novel to get the Persephone treatment – a process involving the book being bound in the publisher’s recognisable dove grey cover with a carefully considered endpaper, sold with a matching bookmark, topped off with a contemporary foreword, and the novel itself reprinted in a sympathetic font. The whole package is comforting, delightful and such a simple idea that it’s no wonder Persephone books are so popular after 10+ years.

Dorothy Whipple was a favourite writer for many in the 1930s, writing page turning novels about, well, families. But these weren’t forerunners to the so-say Aga sagas – these were timely warnings of morality, or small town thinking, or comments about how hard it is to escape our past.

Like another of Whipple’s novels, The Priory, Greenbanks turns a property into a character, and the Greenbanks of this novel is the site for all of the book’s main twists and developments.

Louisa is a devoted mother and grandmother, who’s stood by and supported her husband and children whether through right or wrong. She shows herself to be a loyal, kind and devoted woman, who repeatedly ends up putting herself out for others, sacrificing her wants, and considering the needs of others. But before you think she’s a nauseating do-gooder, Louisa isn’t at all. Hers is simply a tale of kindness winning out.

With a family tree of philanderers, money grabbers and big heads, Louisa has quietly looked out for the underdog. And we watch as she nurtures former neighbour Kate, who was shunned by the village for having had an illegitimate child as a teenager. And we watch as Louisa provides a home for her free-spirited granddaughter Rachel, one that the girl is denied by her own parents due to her father’s pig-headedness.

These are frequent traits in a Whipple novel – women picking up the pieces after men squander their money, or men bring shame on a family, or find other selfish ways to ruin a good woman. But at the same time, these novels don’t hate men – they are also filled with kind and sensitive men, and there are plenty of loathsome female characters to choose from in a Whipple novel.

Trying to decide just what it is that makes Whipple’s novels so readable, so exciting and so compelling, even 80 years after initial publication, is surprisingly tricky. They clearly bring different things to different people – and different readers find different stories and messages in Whipple’s words. Maybe that’s part of her appeal – that she says so much to so many different people. Whatever it is, her novels are comforting, exhilarating and gripping – I worry Persephone are running out of Whipple’s to republish, and am keeping my fingers crossed that somewhere, someone will discover a chest of her unpublished manuscripts in their loft. And soon.