Congratulations to Rachel Holmes on the publication of 'Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel'

"When she wrote her memoir of the suffragette movement, Sylvia Pankhurst explained:

My desire has been to introduce the actors in the drama as living beings; to show the striving, suffering, hugely hopeful human entity behind the pageantry, the rhetoric and the turbulence.[i]

Pankhurst’s vivid, detailed and human account, in scale and tone like a nineteenth-century novel filled with memorable characters and dramatic stories, became the defining history of that movement; the basis, for example, for the hugely influential 1970s TV series Shoulder to Shoulder that introduced a new generation to the suffragettes.

Rachel Holmes has achieved a similar feat in her monumental biography of Sylvia Pankhurst.  Where other biographies have focussed on a particular part of Pankhurst’s huge contribution to social movements in the twentieth century (Barbara Winslow’s Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism and Mary Davis’ Sylvia Pankhurst: A Life in Radical Politics), or have written shorter accounts (Shirley Harrison’s Sylvia Pankhurst: A Crusading Life or my own Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire), Rachel Holmes’ book matches the scale, ambition and artistic spirit of her subject’s own writing. 

If Pankhurst had thought about what her biography should look like, I think perhaps she would have hoped for one like this."

You can read the rest of my rest of my review of Rachel Holmes' new biography of Sylvia Pankhurst on Counterfire.  Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel is out now and published by Bloomsbury.

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[i] E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement (London: Virago Limited, 1977), Preface.