A society woman with a secret past becomes a convert to the militant fight for the vote.

The Convert

Elizabeth Robins · 1907

Elizabeth Robins was an actress and activist who marched, spoke, and organized alongside the militant suffragettes she wrote about, and The Convert carries that firsthand knowledge into fiction. Vida Levering begins the novel comfortably inside Edwardian society's velvet constraints; by its end she has thrown her lot in with the women chalking 'Votes for Women' on London pavements and being mobbed in the street for it. The novel is both a sharp social comedy about a class that would rather not notice the movement happening around it, and a serious account of what it costs one woman to stop being a spectator.

18 chapters · 106,691 words · ~8.1 hr read