The Regiment of Women: neo-Edwardian suffrage narratives and women writers of the 1910s

This essay will re-evaluate several women writers of the 1910s as neo-Edwardian writers, by examining a range of fictional and autobiographical texts that are set in the recent past of the Edwardian period. It will focus in particular on three suffragette narratives that were published in the pre-World War One years - Constance Maud, No Surrender (1911), Gertrude Colmore, Suffragette Sally (1911) and Lady Constance Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners: some personal experiences (1914) – that seek to represent, and evaluate, the movement’s activities during the Edwardian decade and which have not yet been the subject of sustained critical comparison. By identifying some distinctive formal and thematic tropes in these texts, I aim to explore their continuing interest to different scholarly communities and to develop a fresh reading of these works’ literary, and wider cultural and social, provenance as neo-Edwardian texts.