2021/155: Old Baggage -- Lissa Evans

‘You’re a very disputatious woman,’ he said, as if that were a slur. [loc. 2189]

This is, chronologically, the first in the loose trilogy that continues with Crooked Heart and V for Victory, both of which I read in 2021 during pandemic lockdown. Old Baggage is at once more and less cheerful: it's set before WW2, and focusses on women's rights, especially the multiple campaigns for female enfranchisement.

The setting is Hampstead in 1928, and the protagonist is Mattie Simpkin, a single woman in her late fifties who is somewhat adrift, nostalgic for the glory days of the suffragettes. She lives with her friend and lodger, Florrie Lee (known as 'the Flea'), whose support goes largely unacknowledged. When Mattie encounters a fellow campaigner from the old days and realises that the young women of 1928 lack direction and drive, she sets up a girls' club called the Amazons. The first recruit is a young woman named Ida: later come others (including Winnie and Avril who also appear in V for Victory). Mattie's Amazons gain healthy exercise and life skills: they also attract the attention of the Empire Youth League, a militaristic youth club run by a former comrade of Mattie's. All might yet be well, except for the insidious presence of Inez, the daughter of yet another suffragette -- and of a man who was very dear to Mattie.

There is much to like about this novel: the centring of female experience; the middle-aged protagonist looking back on the days of bread and roses; the small tragedies (the old baggage of love, loss, injustice, imprisonment) that Mattie and the Flea carry with them; the gaps between Mattie's self-image and her tactless, sometimes cruel behaviour. When catastrophe strikes, it's a small, domestic sort of catastrophe, an error of judgement rather than a deliberate betrayal -- though none the less painful for that. There's a good London ambience, too, though less so than in V for Victory: Mattie lives a more rarified life than Vee.

Once I'd finished this, I went back to check a couple of references in the other books and ended up rereading most of V for Victory, which is certainly my favourite of the three: really good, though, to see some of the characters from Old Baggage showing up as grown adults, in a world changed in ways they could barely have imagined.