Journalist, author and suffragette.

4 August 1869 -17 June 1955

A Tribute By Angela V. John

Evelyn Sharp was a deceptively demure rebel. A passionate believer in justice and equality for all, her life was dedicated to helping women achieve this through her writings and actions. A modest woman, she didn’t seek the limelight and isn’t as well remembered as she deserves to be. And she has sometimes suffered from being viewed through the prism of the famous men in her life: her brother, the folksong and dance collector Cecil Sharp, and her husband, the dashing radical war correspondent, Henry W. Nevinson. 

Born into a large Victorian family – she was the ninth of eleven children – Evelyn had a privileged childhood (her father owned a slate business). They lived in South London then Weston Turville, Buckinghamshire where they resided at the Manor House. From a young age Evelyn chafed against the gendered expectations and hierarchies of her traditional family, dominated by her many brothers. So, she found liberating the four terms she spent as a boarder at a London school. She later wrote that ‘School was the great adventure of late Victorian girlhood, where girls for the first time found their own level.’ 

This experience and her vivid imagination found expression in her contributions to the girls’ magazine Atalanta from 1893. It also serialised what became the novella The Making of a School Girl (1897). This was followed in 1901 by another popular tale, The Youngest Girl in the School (1901), the first of a number of books published by Macmillan. 

Evelyn’s first publication (in 1889) had been a defence of fairy tales. She believed in appealing ‘to the marvellous’ in young people’s minds. Denied her brothers’ opportunities to go to university, she had taught local lads in Western Turville two evenings a week for more than four years, regaling them with historical tales and Shakespearean readings and ending each class with one of her own fairy tales. Evelyn published four volumes of fairy stories at the turn of the century, each with eight stories beautifully illustrated by Mabel Dearmer or Alice B. Woodward. Humour is central to all her stories. A table walks. Why else would it have four legs? The future pacifist gives us Kit the Coward who doesn’t fight like other boys and loves animals. He is the bravest boy in the world. A Princess rescues herself by walking out of the door to her ‘lonely tower.’ One princess asks why it is the prince who always goes out into the world to find a princess. Why shouldn’t the princess do the finding for a change? It is not a major leap from this thinking to the committed feminist and suffragette.

Evelyn’s first novel for adults At the Relton Arms (1895), published by the highly regarded Bodley Head press, had been a comedy of manners about two sons and drawn on her own family. Evelyn moved to London in the 1890s, surviving financially by teaching and reviewing. She had a number of stories published in the avant-garde periodical, The Yellow Book. Here she questioned assumptions: ‘The Other Anna’, for example, subverted the familiar trope of the sexually available artists’ model. 

In 1901 Evelyn met Henry W. Nevinson, war correspondent, author and campaigner for social justice. They began a long-term relationship that eventually saw them marry in 1933, not long after the death of his wife, Margaret Wynne Nevinson. Evelyn and Henry were prominent in men’s organisation for women’s suffrage: he acknowledged that she was a far better suffrage speaker than himself.  Mrs Pankhurst judged her one of the best. After initially joining the moderate suffragists, Evelyn became in 1907 a member of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and secretary of the Kensington WSPU, one of London’s largest branches, from 1910 to 1914. 

Her two worlds of writing and suffrage came together in the fourteen stories that comprise Rebel Women, first published in 1910 but now back in print. These brilliant tales of the unexpected show us the ingenuity and verve that pervaded the movement. A particularly powerful vignette sketches the tense atmosphere at a political meeting about to be addressed by a cabinet minister. Stewards scan the crowd expecting trouble-makers. Those clad in the WSPU colours of people, white and green are immediately suspect. But it is the quietly dressed ones in grey and black who really need watching and interrupt the minister’s speech on liberty, warning us how deceptive appearances can be. After boasting that he is a protector of women, a steward deals a blow to the woman in black before she is dragged out of the hall. We learn of the courage it had taken for her to speak out. She had ‘never been to a political meeting till she went to be thrown out of one.’ 

One of Evelyn’s many contributions to the cause was to write persuasive articles for the non-suffrage press. One was a piece called ‘Behind the Locked Door.’ It told readers of the weekly paper The Nation about a suffragette’s first-hand experience of prison. Evelyn was imprisoned twice in Holloway. In 1911 she was arrested after breaking windows in a government office. She went on hunger strike during her second incarceration in 1913. One of her Rebel Women stories had been called To Prison while the Sun Shines. She also became a tax resister and the furniture in her Bloomsbury flat was distrained.

Unlike the Pankhursts and the WSPU, Evelyn did not cease to be an activist when war broke out. She and Nevinson had recently helped to found a new mixed society called the United Suffragists which continued to campaign. Since 1912 she had been editor of the WSPU’s weekly suffrage paper Votes for Women and now it became an organ of the United Suffragists. She only relinquished this demanding job in 1918. When Royal Assent was finally granted for the limited vote for women on 6 February 1918, Evelyn was one of the three stalwarts left at the Palace of Westminster to hear the news. In her autobiography she recalled then walking up Whitehall as ‘almost the happiest moment of my life.’ 

Evelyn was a pacifist and sat on the council of the Women’s International League for three years. Although she never joined the Society of Friends, she was a committed Christian and humanitarian, working closely with the Quakers in Relief work in Berlin in 1920. Two years later she undertook harrowing relief work with them in Russia, travelling huge distances in horrendous conditions, working against the odds to feed and save victims of the famine.

Since 1919 Evelyn had been on the staff of the Daily Herald and helped to publicise in print the harrowing situation in Russia as well as the excesses of the Black and Tans she witnessed in Ireland. The Herald also published her wonderfully witty short stories. Although she had been writing on and off for the Manchester Guardian since 1904, Evelyn became the first regular contributor to its iconic Women’s Page from its start in 1922 and her features over the next twelve years ensured a radical edge to any subject. 

Evelyn continued to write fiction and much else. Her books for adults included a biography of the scientist Hertha Ayrton. She wrote two authoritative studies of childhood and even a book on folk dancing – in later life she and Henry Nevinson became keen folk dancers. Through this she met Ralph Vaughan Williams and in 1936 wrote the libretto for his comic opera The Poisoned Kiss. Three years earlier, she had published her autobiography Unfinished Adventure and married Nevinson. Unconventional to the last, the bride wore black! 

 In 1941 the elderly couple were bombed out of their Hampstead home and decamped to the Cotswolds where Henry Nevinson died in 1941. Evelyn moved back to London, survived the rest of the war and lived on until 1955.

Angela V. John is a biographical historian and the author of Evelyn Sharp’s biography (see below). She has written/edited a dozen books. They include biographies of Elizabeth Robins, Lady Rhondda and Henry Nevinson.  She was formerly professor of History at the University of Greenwich, London and is now an honorary professor at Swansea University and president of Llafur, the Welsh People’s History Society. She is part of Monumental Welsh Women organising the erection of statues of women across Wales and currently writing a biography of Philip Burton.

MINI BIOGRAPHY

Some Key Achievements and Interests

Wrote more than 30 books.

Contributor to The Yellow Book

A key suffragette, editor of Votes for Women, helped found the United Suffragists.

Last British woman to refuse to pay taxes because she lacked the vote.

International Humanitarian. Did Quaker Relief Work in Germany and Russia post WW1.

Wrote for the Manchester Guardian for four decades, first regular contributor to its Women’s Page.

Librettist for a Vaughan Williams opera.

Connections to Bloomsbury

1890s Lodged at Brabazon House, Store Street.

Coached an architect’s daughter in Bedford Square.

1914  Moved to a small rented flat at 38 Doughty Street.

1915  Moved to a larger flat at 16 John Street. This was in a 5-storey house where John Oxenford, translator theatre critic for The Times had lived in the 1840s. Evelyn sublet her largest room to a war worker. Believing in ‘No taxation without Representation’, she refused to pay her taxes and in May 1915 bailiffs began removing her furniture. By July her room had been stripped bare. Only her bed and clothes remained (even her wash-stand was taken). Her heating, lighting and electricity were cut off for a time and her royalties confiscated. By 1917 she owed 6 years’ tax. She was declared Bankrupt. Her furniture was sold at public auction but bought by friends. There were various court appearances but only in May 1918 was she declared free of bankruptcy.

Publications by Evelyn Sharp include:

At the Relton Arms: A Novel, John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1895

Wymps and Other Fairy Tales, John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1896

The Making of a Prig, John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1897

All the Way to Fairyland, John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1898

The Making of a School Girl, 1897; OUP, New York, 1989

The Other Side of the Sun, John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1900

The Youngest Girl in the School, Macmillan, 1901

Round the World to Wympland, John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1902

The Other Boy, Macmillan, 1902

The Children who Ran Away, Macmillan, 1903

Micky, Macmillan, 1905

Nicolete: A Novel, Constable, 1907

Rebel Women, A.C. Fifield, 1910: Portrayer Publishers, 2003

The Victories of Olivia and other Stories, Macmillan, 1912

The War of All the Ages, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1915

A Communion of Sinners and Other Short Stories, George Allen & Unwin, 1917

Somewhere in Christendom: A Fantasy, 1919

Who Was Jane? A Story for Young People of All Ages, Macmillan, 1922

Hertha Ayrton 1854-1923: A Memoir, Edward Arnold, 1926

The London Child, The Bodley Head, 1927

The Child Grows Up, The Bodley Head, 1929

The African Child: An Account of the International Conference on African Children, Longmans, Green & Co, 1931

Unfinished Adventure: Selected Reminiscences from an Englishwoman’s Life, The Bodley Head, 1933; Faber & Faber, 2008.

For further information about Evelyn Sharp see:

Angela V. John, Evelyn Sharp. Rebel Woman, 1869-1955, Manchester University Press, 2009; Idem, “‘Behind the Locked Door’: Evelyn Sharp, suffragette and rebel journalist”, Women’s History Review, 12/1,2003; Idem, ‘What The Papers Say: Evelyn Sharp, Author, Journalist, Suffragette and Diarist’, The Bodleian Library Record, 23/1,2010 and Idem, articles on Evelyn Sharp in HerStoria, Issues 5, Spring 2010 and 7, Autumn 2010.

Evelyn Sharp’s Papers, including her sporadic diaries, are in the Bodleian Library, Oxford University.