title: Kessie
author: Marlow, Joyce
description: "Kessie Thorpe, the daughter of a Manchester mill-owner is charming, innocent, eager.  Sarah Whitworth hails from a tough, working class Lancashire background.  Sarah’s charismatic brother Tom succeeds in   being elected an MP for the emerging Labour  Party.  Alice Hartley is a rich American, brought to England to find a titled husband, but  headstrong, golden girl  Alice has other ideas.
  Their lives converge in 1905 when the three young women join the Pankhursts in the suffrage struggle; the first major step on the road to sexual equality.   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, tolerance 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. The brilliant organization; the mass demonstrations;   the stunts; imprisonment, hunger strikes and  the horrors of forcible feeding; the police brutality on “Black Friday”.
  A highly readable novel with surprising relevance to the problems  that still face women today.
  About the Author
  Kessie is the first of a trilogy, Sarah and Anne being the other two titles.  Joyce Marlow is also the author of  several “straight” history books – The Peterloo Massacre and The Tolpuddle Martyrs among them. She has edited two highly praised anthologies for Virago Press – Votes for Women and Women and the Great War.
  Joyce  was deeply involved in writers’ campaigns in London in the 1970-80s and was  a founder member of the Authors Licensing and Copyright Society (ALCS). She is widowed, has two sons and two grandchildren and now lives on the moors outside her native city, Manchester.
  For further information (and pix) you can Google her.