Notes bibliogr. Bibliogr. p. 319-320. Index

Sylvia Pankhurst was in turn suffragette, pacifist, communist, anti-fascist, and pan-africanist. Daughter of the famous Emmeline and sister of Christabel Pankhurst, she was a relentless campaigner for the rights of women and, in particular, for the rights of unmarried women. An acquaintance of Lenin, she was a friend of Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russel, Vera Brittain, and a host of leading figures in the worlds of politics and literature. She became the lover of the Independent Labour Party leader Keir Hardie, an unmarried mother at the age of forty-six, and, at the end of her life, an earnest devotee of Emperor Haile Sellassie of Ethiopia. Shaw described her as 'the queerest idiot-genius of the age -- the most ungovernable, self-interested, blindly and deadly willful little rapscallion-condotiera that ever imposed itself on the infra-red end of the revolutionary spectrum'.
In the first full-length biography of Sylvia Pankhurst, Patricia Romero critically analyses Sylvia's self image as portrayed in her autobiographical works The Suffragette, The Suffragette Movement, and The Homefront, combining this with the results of extensive documentary research and interviews with many people who had known Sylvia at diverse phases of her career. Romero reveals Sylvia as much more complex and less admirable than hitherto imagined. She was a many-sided radical publicist who espoused the most thorough and extreme version of every cause. She was self-obsessed and single-minded in whatever cause she made her own, and frequently abandoned her crusades rather than seek compromise. Yet Sylvia was also intensely charismatic and, as one of the earliest in Britain to speak out against fascism, her efforts as a publicist were formidable.
Sylvia Pankhurst's life wound its way through much of the fabric of England's social protest from the years before the first world war until her death in 1960. Although not the feminist socialist heroine that recent historians have considered her, she was, nonetheless, a powerful and significant personality. Her story is now told with skill, sympathy, and objectivity.