Emily Wilding Davison

Description

Emily Wilding Davison was the most famous suffragette to die in the battle for women's rights after she rushed onto the Epsom racecourse in 1913 and collided with the King's horse. Her notorious final act of protest has for decades obscured the extraordinary life she lived and the impassioned arguments that underpinned her militancy. In this centenary year of UK women first receiving the franchise, this biography reveals the true story of Davison's life and times. A middle-class governess for most of her adulthood, she pivoted towards violence, vandalism, jail time and force-feeding only in her final years. Lucy Fisher, a Times journalist, draws on the suffragette's own words, contemporary press reports, local histories and academic scholarship to paint a vivid picture of a strange life and a tragic finale.

Lucy Fisher is senior political correspondent at The Times. Previously she has been political reporter for the New Statesman and The Observer, and began her career in journalism at the Sunday Times. She lives in London.

Political journalist Lucy Fisher's debut is a compelling examination of the short but eventful life of the suffragette Emily Davison, who sacrificed her life at the 1913 Derby, living up to her organisation's maxim of "deeds not words". Fisher's skilful biography unpacks the apparent contradictions in Davison's life; born into upper-middle-class privilege, a series of tragic reversals saw her family reduced to poverty and led her to become radicalised from a young age. Fisher does not shy away from describing the cruelty of the treatment that suffragettes received, but makes a convincing case for Davison having achieved a great deal more than simply being a martyr to the cause. - Alexander Larman, the Observer