Old Baggage by Lissa Evans *** (of 4)

Matilde Simpkin is a larger-than-life veteran of England's militant suffragette movement: wise-cracking, verbally combative, and still committed to the rights of women. By 1928, however, women's right to vote is wending its way through Parliament and now middle-aged, Miss Simpkin's retellings of the armed battles with authorities play to bored audiences.

A chance encounter with a former militant who in the waning years of the 1920s has taken up with proto-Fascists in the guise of training England's youth to respect order and authority ignites a blaze in Simpkin. In response, she organizes girls and young women into a club called The Amazons, teaching them athletics, hiking, fire-making, throwing, debating, map-reading, and well generally all of the things that girls were forbidden to partake of during the long reign of Queen Victoria. You can see the competition between the two groups in the offing with the underlying (and still wholly relevant) question of how girls can run, play, be active, and feminine all while constrained by expectations of a hidebound society around them.

Lissa Evans captures the period with pitch perfection. Matilde Simpkin and her live-in companion, Florrie Lee, always referred to as The Flea live in a home called "The Mousehole" on the edge of a heath that is just perfect for tramping. Mattie is always armed with a verbal challenge for her gaggle of girls just beginning to perspire. George Bernard Shaw would approve.