Bodies politic - Michiel Heyns (First edition)

"Tell him you love him; he has only three weeks to live."

Against the background of massive public events—the tenacious, at times violent struggle for the vote for women and the First World War—Bodies Politic examines, in a formalized frame, the private lives of the participants in these events, focused through the highly articulate accounts of three suffragettes.

Moving dramatic and at times grimly humorous, Bodies Politic is an entirely original account of great love and bitter resentment, political victory and personal defeat, but ultimately of the indomitable spirit that escapes the shackles of the body.

The three women who look back on a past they shared, not always harmoniously, are Emmeline Pankhurst, the formidable leader of the Women’s Movement; her daughter Sylvia, the weeping suffragette; and the enchanting Helen, who was loved by Harry, the neglected son of Emmeline and beloved brother of Sylvia.

Through the narrative of each woman flits the figure of Christabel, Mrs. Pankhurst's favorite daughter: selfish, vain but irresistible. The three accounts, sometimes contradictory, sometimes confirmatory, movingly reconstruct Harry's last days and the human entanglements behind the public acts of the time. Sylvia accedes in bringing Helen to Harry's bedside, Emmeline's bitterness at Sylvia is not healed by her ambivalence about Sylvia's extraordinary request: "Tell him you love him; he has only three weeks to live."