Kessie

An award winning story of the epic campaign for 'Votes for Women ' and a tempestuous love affair…..

Kessie Thorpe, the daughter of a Manchester mill-owner is charming, innocent, eager. Sarah Whitworth hails from a tough, working class Lancashire background. Alice Hartley is a rich American, brought to England to find a titled husband, but headstrong Alice has other ideas. Their lives converge in 1905 when the three young women join the Pankhursts in the suffrage struggle. And join forces to get Sarah's charismatic brother Tom Whitworth elected as an MP for the newly formed Labour party.

At the core of the novel is Kessie and Tom's stormy marriage, Alice's desire to bed Tom, and Sarah's disastrous foray into 'free love'. While Kessie struggles to find the balance between her personal life as wife and mother and what she sees as her public duty, Tom's attitude towards the wife he loves is a mixture of pride and an exasperation that leads him astray.

Joyce Marlow draws on her extensive historical knowledge to depict the highs and lows of the suffrage campaign in a highly readable novel that has a surprising relevance to the problems that still face women in the twenty-first century.