Things a Bright Girl Can Do

This story is set in the period of the First World War and the passage of the Act of Parliament that gave women over the age of 30 the right to vote. It is told from the viewpoints of three very different women, namely: Evelyn Collins, a clever upper class girl with sights set on university; May Thompson, who is a middle class girl, like her mother a Quaker and a pacifist; and Nell Swanscott, a fierce young woman living close to poverty. The role and situation of pacifists in this period are rarely well depicted. All three of these young women are militant suffragists.

Nichols’s book is unusually successful in three significant ways. The narrative emerges from three very different protagonists. Nichols makes each of them convincing and she welds their contributions into a consistent whole. She captures impressively the passion these women brought to their struggle for the most elementary of political rights, the right to a say in who governs. And she depicts with conviction what was then a highly unconventional – not to say illicit – sexual taste.

Books set in period demand of an author willingness to tackle a serious research task if verisimilitude is to be achieved. Nichols is to be congratulated on demonstrating her power over what must have been a mountain of research, though the detail never clouds the narrative.

The publication of this book in the centenary year of Passchendaele is wholly appropriate.