ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the work and network of New Woman writer and Yellow Book contributor Netta Syrett (1865–1943), illuminating her influential role as a suffrage writer in a fin-de-siècle feminist literary community. As well as mapping Syrett’s connections to prestigious women’s suffrage campaigners, this chapter traces the increasing politicisation of her work in its focus on two almost entirely unexplored texts preoccupied with women’s suffrage. These are: her recently published suffrage play of 1909, Might is Right, and her critically neglected novel of 1930, Portrait of a Rebel which was adapted into the famous film A Woman Rebels (1936), starring Katharine Hepburn. An analysis of these two texts in conjunction offers insight into Syrett’s understudied works and traces her authorial evolution over the course of her career in response to the women’s suffrage campaign, while demonstrating her important if largely forgotten contribution to early feminist literature.
