Lissa Evans has had a good idea for her new novel. It’s ‘suffragettes: the sequel’. She sets her story not in 1918 but in 1928. Two washed-up spinster suffragettes in their sixties, Florrie (known as ‘the Flea’) and Mattie, live together platonically in a house in Hampstead known as the Mousehole, because it used to be a convalescent home for hunger-striking suffragettes during the Cat and Mouse Act. It’s freezing, and they cut up old Christmas cards for splints, conversing like two dotty old dons. ‘What utter spinach!’ ‘Small sherry? Or a toddy? Buck you up a bit.’
Their WSPU glory days are behind them. Florrie is now a sanitary inspector, and Mattie gives lectures with slides about her window-smashing past. She still wears her Holloway brooch and her hunger-strike medals, and she has a permanent depression in one calf resulting from a steward jabbing the ferrule of his umbrella directly into the muscle.
So, what’s the plot going to be? Well, Mattie decides to start a girls’ club on Hampstead Heath, aiming to train girls from different backgrounds in vigorous pursuits such as wood-chopping, as well as in vigorous thinking — her mottoes are ‘Dare to be a Daniel’ and ‘Say not the needle is the proper pen for a woman’.
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