Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel by Rachel Holmes

Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel
By Rachel Holmes
Bloomsbury, 2020

For reasons murmured only between themselves and their indulgent God, Bloomsbury Publishing brought out their US edition of Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel by Rachel Holmes in mid-December of 2020, when all Books section editors had already retired to their stately homes in Larchmont and the Hamptons and all of their reviewers have gone into three weeks of winter hibernation accompanied only by several quarts of Rock Bottom bathtub gin and their customary batch of professional regrets. Into such a void, a 950-page biography of a famous 20th-century activist and suffragist can be expected to sink without a sound.

We should hope that doesn’t happen in this case; Rachel Holmes has written a big, magnificent book, more broad-scale and comprehensive than Barbara Winslow’s excellent Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism and more detailed and empathetic than Patricia Romero’s E. Sylvia Pankhurst: Portrait of a Radical. 

Pankhurst was born in 1882 to one of the most famous activist families of modern times, and much of Natural Born Rebel’s initial interpersonal drama derives from the tensions between Sylvia and her mother Emmeline and sister Christabel. Readers watch the slow and piecemeal education of an agitator, the shaping of Sylvia’s moral code and social preoccupations into a fairly firm mosaic that Holmes characterizes as “typical Sylvia”:

Enable individuals, groups and communities. This is what she understood as one of the key elements of participatory democracy. Facilitate agency. Work for opportunities for people, especially women, to advocate for themselves. She deployed her own class confidence and experience to get other people through the door, into meetings, and then obdurately flexed her muscle to try and ensure they got a fair hearing. This emphasis on facilitating other people’s agency was key to Sylvia’s strategies of empowerment for democratic socialism.

These were “the lessons in sexual equality learned in the nursery of the Pankhurst household,” and they drove Sylvia to her famous career as an advocate for a broad range of issues, from advocating for votes for women to vociferously opposing the rise of fascism to, later in her life, championing emperor Haile Selassie and the liberation of Ethiopia from colonialism in general and Italian aggression in specific. Holmes devotes the last part of her big book to this late-blooming political passion, and that section contains not only some of her best research but also some of her sharpest jabs - in this case, at The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, the 1978 book by “Polish journalist and literary charlatan” Ryszard Kapuscinski. “When Kapuscinski died, tributes flooded in from his well-known literary admirers,” Holmes writes. “In fact, he was a highly imaginative and talented liar whose greatest ability was to produce colourful and lyrical fictions.”

The portrait of Sylvia Pankhurst that emerges from Natural Born Rebel is of a valiant woman, naturally, but also of an indefatigable worker: almost always concentrated entirely on the subject at hand, always overcoming obstacles, and above all constantly writing. “Sylvia had two very distinct styles,” Holmes writes of that vast prose output, “one of absolute rapier-like, shorn-black, evidence-based factual precision and succinct argument; the other one of picaresque narrative, liberally adorned with garlands and bouquets.” There are ways in which that divide runs through Pankhurst’s nature, not just her work, and Holmes captures that multifaceted complexity with a sheer readability no previous biography of this figure has achieved. 

Pankhurst died in 1960 and was given an elaborate state funeral in Ethiopia and a raft of praise from the emperor, his family, and major figures from all over the world. About herself she had earlier written: “She desired it might always be true of her that she never deserted a cause in its days of adversity.” There are plenty of days of adversity in this impressive book - it’s a warrior’s life - but no desertion. Here’s hoping it finds a US readership, despite the windswept limbo of its release date.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The National. He writes regularly for The Vineyard Gazette, the Daily Star and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.