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It's Cover Price in Hardback is £35
Amazon UK are offering it at under £23 incl. P&P
"...Embodiment of the Human Mind..."
First thing, you may want to cancel your gym membership after reading this hardback. Weighing in at a huge 949 pages, it’ll certainly flex those tendons when you actually lift it up.
I bought the Hardback Edition for my 62nd birthday when "Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel" by RACHEL HOLMES was first published in September 2020 and it is a beast of an autobiography in every way. I cannot imagine the decade or more of archive rummaging and sleuth uncovering that it must have taken to collate this mighty tome - respectful yet thankfully honest in the transfer – good stuff and bad.
I'm presently about eight chapters in and the sheer volume of research and personal detail is still coming at me like a freight train. I mention this because it can be hard to jumble and sort the cascade of information; so you will need to invest in this book – but what a payoff.
Academic in approach by sheer voluminous necessity aside, thankfully Holmes is smart enough to bring Sylvia alive via the personal. Holmes digs in deep to every aspect of this remarkable woman's life - her formative years at the hands of parents who were political revolutionaries that seemed to spend every waking minute of every day actually practising this coda rather than spouting it out in crowd-pleasing speeches and endless correspondence to newspapers. Her barrister father Dr. Richard Pankhurst and the Suffrage Leader he worshipped as his equal in mind, body and soul - Emmeline - loom large in everything that formed Sylvia. Sisters Christabel and Adela are also woven into the campaigner fabric.
Yet, if you told the precocious Sylvia to sit down quietly in the schoolroom because calm was good for her and the other pupils trying to study, she would be the Lemmy and Angus Young drawing a rusty nail across the window pain in defiance.
Born 1882 in Stretford England and passing in 1960 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia - Sylvia had rebelliousness, action and staggering willpower built into her D.N.A. Famously the only one of the Pankhurst ladies to suffer the gag-horror of force-feeding, between 1913 and 1914 alone, the then Herbert Asquith-led British Liberal government had her arrested thirteen times over eighteen months and subjected to the most brutal oral attacks - often twice a day to break her. Other suffragettes were subjected to rape and physical violence with impunity – some driven to insanity by it.
From early on, Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst wrote plays, edited home newspapers, drafted speeches and fought like a demented Wylie Coyote chasing the entrenched Roadrunner of the British Establishment for real change to the abysmal lot of women in all fields – access to Education, equality in Marriage, Property ownership, the right to Academic Achievements and of course the fundamental right to vote.
The typically arrogant and appeasing young Winston Churchill actually set up a department in the old-boys network to 'deal with' the avalanche of political correspondence Sylvia Pankhurst sent them. She was eloquent too - her prose filled with purpose, the ideas thought out and executed with precision like she knew that one day, everything she ever said would be of historical importance.
Yet through all of this comes her activist spirit - beautiful - courageous - magnificent and true. You think of the D-Day little guys - the ones who actual did the job of saving the Western World - grunts storming the beaches of Normandy to end tyranny - and there would be Sylvia Pankhurst - head first into the hail and horror.
I will get to finish this astonishing book at some time in the future, but it only remains for me to say that mere admiration of Sylvia Pankhurst doesn't quite cut it. I'm in awe of her - and therefore the academic and brilliant Rachel Homes has done her job.
Check out the photo on the front cover - there is a scar above her eyebrow from a childhood fall. It required stitches, but she was back fighting the next day - even as a kid wanting to better the lot of others - wanting every life to be free and full of potential.
Buy and behold...
