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The Call

By Edith Ayrton Zangwill

The Call

By Edith Ayrton Zangwill

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Description
The title of The Call, about a woman scientist who abandons her research work to be a suffragette, has several meanings military, feminist, vocational, emotional. Although the novel has been ignored for nearly a hundred years, it is an important, and extremely readable, book. It starts slowly and takes 80 or 100 pages before then shocking the reader with its radicalism. It begins with a leisurely and detailed trawl round a house in Lowndes Square, ending up in the heroine’s ‘lab of one’s own’ . It is clear at once that the domestic detail is a crucial part of The Call. The novel gets into its stride when Ursula accompanies her mother to Henley , encounters some suffragettes and is appalled by them. But some months later, by chance, she sits in on a court case involving a prostitute and her nine year old daughter who has been sexually assaulted by a client. The leniency of the three month sentence compared with a twelve month sentence for a man who has stolen a pair of boots horrifies her. She realises that ‘it was the law that was insane, or rather the lawmakers... The suffragettes were right. There was some connection between such things and the Vote.’ Sadly, novels about the war and about votes for women were largely ignored during the 1920s the former was too raw and the latter ‘too remote to be topical andamp too recent to be innocuous’ . Even the theme of a woman scientist in a man’s world was rather remote for the average novel reader. Yet, as Elizabeth Day writes ‘The Call gives a rare insight into a woman’s domestic life in the first two decades of the 20th century ... domestic details about running a house are, most unusually, given their due alongside Ursula’s political actions, elegantly making the point that a woman’s work behind closed doors is just as worthy of our attention as what goes on in the wider world.’ By making political points in the guise of a ‘woman’s novel’, the author stunningly reveals her commitment to feminism.’
Product details
Binding:
Paperback
Number of Pages:
448
Release Date:
2018-10-18
Publication Date:
2018-10-18
Publisher:
Persephone Books Ltd
Languages:
Published: English, Original: English
ISBN10:
1910263192
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
[email protected]
Weight:
546 g
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