Gloria, with her worldliness and social ease, and with remarks such as "She is HISTORY and so is that dumb school" and "he'll sue your ass off", could have time-travelled to 1913 from some future decade. The interplay between the girls, likely for young readers to be the most entertaining part of the novel, is not always believable. A marvellous moment follows in which Hazel, thwarted in following Gloria's instructions, looks around for a substitute victim and fixes on Shakespeare, blaming him for the misery of a turgid and heavily censored round-the-class reading of King Lear Motivated more by mischief and malice than by a desire for equality, Gloria stirs a group of friends into taking defiant action at Madame Tussaud's. More immediately, Hazel's fascination with the suffragists is encouraged by precocious Gloria, an American classmate at the Kensington School for the Daughters of Gentlemen. An orphan, she has "married up", which is soon expected of Hazel herself when her father breaks down after gambling too heavily on the Derby. Still dog-obsessed, she's an inadequate and indifferent parent, but somehow still likable. In the first, longer section of the novel, focusing on Hazel's family and schoolfriends, readers of Hearn's Ivy will be intrigued to rediscover its heroine, a pre-Raphaelite beauty, as Hazel's mother. Her privileged position in a Kensington home and at an exclusive school stems from her father's ancestor winning a sugar plantation in a poker game. The dashingly-named Hazel Mull-Dare knows that the surname was originally Moulder. But the novel moves beyond the suffrage protests to take in ideas of heredity, class, luck and chance, moving to a Caribbean island for its final section. Hazel begins with one of the best-known incidents in women's battle for the vote, the fatal run of Emily Davison into the path of galloping Derby-runners. With the suffragists, there's the particular appeal that many of the lawbreakers were women defying convention and upbringing.
Readers can readily identify with the strong sense of injustice and the yearning for change, likening the protests and demonstrations to recent events in the UK and beyond - and it's good for teenagers to be reminded that Girl Power didn't begin with the Spice Girls. It's surprising that the Votes for Women campaign hasn't featured more widely in teenage fiction.
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