astray from the goal of building a broadly based movement. Further, Emmeline
is also portrayed as a rather vain woman, so fastidious about being well dressed
that she could leave a socialist meeting because she found a bug on her glove.
She deliberately sought the limelight, not just for the women’s cause but for her
own personal reasons. ‘You have balked me – both of you!’, Emmeline is alleged
to have said of Keir Hardie and Sylvia when they deterred her from creating a
disturbance in the House of Commons. ‘I thought there would have been one
little nitch [sic] in the temple of fame for me!’^21
Although, unsurprisingly, Emmeline Pethick Lawrence praised The suffragette
movementas a story told ‘with a faithfulness to the facts’ in a spirit of ‘imper-
sonal passion’, Ray Strachey was condemnatory. ‘There is much bitterness and
misrepresentation in its pages, much inaccuracy and misstatement, and an
evident and undisguised animus against Mrs. Pankhurst and Christabel which is
almost tragic in its intensity.’^22 When Adela, in Australia, finally read the book
she was filled with sorrow and indignation. In an unpublished comment, she
noted that Sylvia:
makes out that my father was faultless, my mother full of faults.
Readers should understand that in Sylvia’s eyes to cease to be a
socialist, if one had ever been one, is a moral crime. ... I am convinced
that had my mother remained in the I.L.P. or become a pacifist or
communist, her conduct in relation to Harry and myself would not
have received any censure from Sylvia and the bitter feelings she writes
about her childhood would never have been penned.^23But perhaps it was especially Christabel and the ageing, loyal ex-WSPU members
who were horrified and hurt by the contents of Sylvia’s The suffragette movement.
Many of the old militants were members of the Suffragette Fellowship,
founded in 1926 by former WSPU and WFL members to perpetuate the
memory of the pioneers and outstanding events connected with women’s eman-
cipation, especially with the militant suffrage campaign. The Suffragette
Fellowship wrote to Christabel asking her to publish her own account of events.
Politely but firmly Christabel replied that she would not disagree with a
member of her family in public, a position from which she would not budge
during her lifetime.^24 ‘It is a pity that Sylvia has not emulated her elder sister’s
loyalty and greatheartedness and kept a fine book free from a personal bitterness
that had nothing to do with the Movement’, opined Geraldine Lennox, a
comment that provoked an angry reply from a socialist loyal to Sylvia. ‘Except
when it came to the hunger-strike’, wrote an acerbic Charlotte Drake, ‘ I am
afraid the lot of even the most hard-worked of the Suffrage leaders was lighter
than that of the working-class mother of a large family.’^25
As noted in the Introduction, it was Sylvia’s The suffragette movementthat
became the authoritative reading of events, especially after George Dangerfield
adopted and adapted this script in The strange death of Liberal England, first
NICHE IN HISTORY