The Call

The title of The Call, about a woman scientist who abandons her research work (in chemistry) to be a suffragette, has several meanings – military, feminist, vocational, emotional. Although the novel has been ignored for nearly a hundred years, it is an important, and extremely readable, book.

It starts slowly and takes 80 or 100 pages before then shocking the reader with its radicalism. It begins with a leisurely and detailed trawl round a house in Lowndes Square, ending up in the heroine’s ‘lab of one’s own’ (the title of a recent book about women scientists). It is clear at once that the domestic detail is a crucial part of The Call.

The novel gets into its stride when Ursula accompanies her mother to Henley (it is the July of 1909), encounters some suffragettes – and is appalled by them. But some months later, by chance, she sits in on a court case involving a prostitute and her nine-year-old daughter who has been sexually assaulted by a client. The leniency of the three-month sentence compared with a twelve-month sentence for a man who has stolen a pair of boots horrifies her. She realises that ‘it was the law that was insane, or rather the lawmakers... The suffragettes were right. There was some connection between such things and the Vote.’

Sadly, novels about the war and about votes for women were largely ignored during the 1920s: the former was too raw and the latter ‘too remote to be topical & too recent to be innocuous’ (Edith Zangwill to a friend). Even the theme of a woman scientist in a man’s world was rather remote for the average novel-reader. Yet, as Elizabeth Day writes: ‘The Call gives a rare insight into a woman’s domestic life in the first two decades of the 20th century ... domestic details about running a house are, most unusually, given their due alongside Ursula’s political actions, elegantly making the point that a woman’s work behind closed doors is just as worthy of our attention as what goes on in the wider world.’ By making political points in the guise of a ‘woman’s novel’, the author stunningly reveals her commitment to feminism.’