Between Two Fires
1st Edition
Published on 30. September 2022
48 pages
978-1-350-35386-2 (ISBN)
Description
You're between two fires...
They're very warm sometimes.
Noah Adamson is the first Leader of the Labour Party; frequently torn between his socialism and principled support for votes for women on the one hand and the more reactionary views of too many of his colleagues on the other. A middle-aged married man; he is also in love with the young socialist suffragette Freda McLaird. Things look bleak for the cause and the man. Still Noah - inspired by his soulmate - has time for hope and beauty. He looks forward to a time when the movement will be stronger.
Sylvia Pankhurst wrote this previously unpublished play when imprisoned for sedition in the infamous HMP Holloway in 1920/21. Deprived of writing materials in solitary confinement, the legendary activist composed this dramatisation of earlier times with her beloved Keir Hardie - Labour's founding leader - with a contraband pencil on prison issue toilet paper. It would be nearly a hundred years before Pankhurst's biographer Rachel Holmes would discover the play via painstaking analysis of the delicate fragments jumbled into brown envelopes in the archives of the British Library. Holmes' arrangement of the incomplete text brings the poignant story to life in this startlingly topical drama that speaks directly to our own times.
They're very warm sometimes.
Noah Adamson is the first Leader of the Labour Party; frequently torn between his socialism and principled support for votes for women on the one hand and the more reactionary views of too many of his colleagues on the other. A middle-aged married man; he is also in love with the young socialist suffragette Freda McLaird. Things look bleak for the cause and the man. Still Noah - inspired by his soulmate - has time for hope and beauty. He looks forward to a time when the movement will be stronger.
Sylvia Pankhurst wrote this previously unpublished play when imprisoned for sedition in the infamous HMP Holloway in 1920/21. Deprived of writing materials in solitary confinement, the legendary activist composed this dramatisation of earlier times with her beloved Keir Hardie - Labour's founding leader - with a contraband pencil on prison issue toilet paper. It would be nearly a hundred years before Pankhurst's biographer Rachel Holmes would discover the play via painstaking analysis of the delicate fragments jumbled into brown envelopes in the archives of the British Library. Holmes' arrangement of the incomplete text brings the poignant story to life in this startlingly topical drama that speaks directly to our own times.
More details
Series
Edition
1. Auflage
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN-13
978-1-350-35386-2 (9781350353862)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Sylvia Pankhurst | Rachel Holmes
Between Two Fires
Book
09/2022
Methuen Drama
€18.50
Shipment within 15-20 days
Persons
Rachel Holmes is the author of four biographies; The Secret Life of James Barry, The Hottentot Venus, Eleanor Marx: A Life and Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel, all published by Bloomsbury. She has also edited collections of political writing, published as a journalist and worked as an academic, activist and literary programmer. Between Two Fires is her second work for the stage. She co-commissioned Sixty Six Books: 21st Century Writers Speak to the King James Bible (Oberon, 2011), with Josie Rourke and Chris Haydon.
