Elsie and Mairi Go to War:
Two Extraordinary Women on the Western Front

Elsie Knocker and Mairi Chisholm were the two most famous women of the First World War. They met at a motorcycle club in Bournemouth, and when war broke out they roared off to London 'to do their bit'.

Within a month they were on the Western Front and had set up their own first-aid post a hundred yards from the villiage of Pervyse, near Ypres.

News of their courage and expertise spread back to Britain and the 'Angels of Pervyse' became famous. Journalists and photographers told their story, royals and VIPs visited them.

Elsie and Mairi were decorated with seventeen medals for bravery and self-sacrifice. It was the time of their lives, they were at the height of their looks and powers, but adjusting to peacetime life after four extraordinary years was more challenging for them than the war itself.

To read an extract from this book, please go toWRITINGS

Love & Dirt:
The Marriage of Arthur Munby & Hannah Cullwick

On 26 May 1854 Arthur Munby met Hannah Cullwick, the day after her twenty-first birthday. This encounter marked the beginning of a bizarre and sometimes desparately unhappy relationship, yet one which was to endure for more than fifty years.

In many ways Munby typified the cultured Victorian gentleman: a barrister, he was also a published poet and a friend to writers and artists such as R.D. Blackmore and Dante Gabriel Rosetti. Yet he had a fascination with working women, noting down encounters he had with shop girls and rag-pickers, with milliners and maids and sometimes with prostitutes. He collected stories of their lives and struck up affectionate friendships with them. It was in this spirit that he first approached the woman who was to become his wife; but Hannah was to be more to him than simply a story in a notebook or a photograph in an album. A scullery maid from Shropshire, Hannah was literate, intelligent though largely unschooled, strong, graceful and passionate. Their relationship quickly developed into a remarkable but clandestine love affair, an affair charaterised by their mutual obsession - Munby adored to watch Hannah going about her work 'in her dirt' fromscrubbing steps and cleaning chimneys, and she reciprocated with a literally slavish devotion. Drawing on the diaries and letters that both wrote throughout their long relationship, Diane Atkinson paints a picture of the wider shores of Victorian sexuality.

To read an extract from this book, please go to WRITINGS

The Suffragettes in Pictures

This book draws extensively on the little known but important Suffragette Fellowship Collection of archive photographs, newspapers, personal correspondence, artefacts and memoirs, to present a vivid picture of Suffragette life. The strength of the book is its rare images of the Suffragette campaign leading up to the outbreak of the First World War. The book also documents leading personalities in the Suffragette movement, such as Emmeline Pankhurst, Annie Kenney and Emily Wilding Davison, the behind-the-scenes activities at the Women's Social and Political Union, their public propaganda work, the brilliant set-piece demonstrations and the escalation of militancy from 'pestering the polititians' to burning down buildings and attacking works of art. The granting of the Vote in 1918 and 1928 is also discussed. An invaluable end-piece provides much sought-after information about the later careers of some of the women who fought in this dangerous and dramatic campaign.

Although there have been many books on the Suffragettes, surprisingly few photgraphs from this internationally important collection have been published. Sometimes comic, often moving, this meticulously researched and elegantly written book will provide an insight into the reality of the lives of these brave and bold Edwardian women.

Votes for Women

In 1918 women in Britain finally won the vote after a long and determined fight. Why did their struggle take over 50 years to succeed? Who supported and who opposed the demand fo Votes for Women?

Diane Atkinson looks at these questions and considers two very different campaigns in parallel: the battle waged by the militant Suffragettes; and the less well-known activities of the Suffragists.