SYLVIA PANKHURST NATURAL BORN REBEL
RACHEL HOLMES Bloomsbury, 976pp, £35
‘It’s as complete a telling as the most exacting historian or psychologist could wish for’
Sylvia Pankhurst had lots of lives – neglected daughter, talented artist, prolific writer, dedicated member of the Women’s Social and Political Union founded by her mother and sister, breakaway socialist suffragette in the East End, pacifist campaigner in the First World War, lover of Keir Hardie, correspondent of Lenin, unmarried mother, anti-fascist campaigner, Ethiopian national treasure – no wonder, then, that Rachel Holmes takes nearly a thousand pages to tell her story.
Reviewers did not complain at the length of the book – Lucy Davies in the Telegraph described it as ‘complete a telling as the most exacting historian or psychologist could wish for’ and wrote that she had wolfed it down. She revelled in such details as Sylvia’s diet as an impoverished art student in the 1900s – lentils and cocoa – and in Holmes’s avoidance of hagiography. Gerard Degroot in the Times was at pains to point out that the book’s size was not the result of ‘a collection of facts carelessly assembled; it is
instead a sophisticated symphony of intriguing and complex analysis, delivered in mellifluous harmony... feminist theory is used as a scalpel, not a sledgehammer’.
Amanda Foreman in the Sunday Times suggested that ‘the genius of Holmes’s fascinating and important biography is that it approaches Sylvia’s life as if she were a man. The writing… is dense and serious, as befits a woman who never wore make-up and didn’t care about clothes... Rather than dwelling on moods and relationships, Holmes is interested in ideas and consequences.’ This made it ‘wonderfully refreshing’.