Evelyn Sharp

Evelyn Jane Nevinson (; 4 August 1869 – 17 June 1955), better known as Evelyn Sharp, was a pacifist and writer who was a key figure in two major British women's suffrage societies, the militant Women's Social and Political Union and the United Suffragists. She helped found the latter and became editor of Votes for Women during the First World War. She was twice imprisoned and became a tax resister. An established author who had published in The Yellow Book, she was especially well known for her children's fiction.

Early life

Evelyn Sharp, the ninth of eleven children, was born on 4 August 1869. Cecil Sharp the folk-song collector was her elder brother. Sharp's family sent her to a boarding school. She went to a Parisian finishing school while her brothers went to university.

In 1894, against the wishes of her family, she moved to London, where she worked as a private tutor and wrote several novels including All the Way to Fairyland (1898) and The Other Side of the Sun (1900).

In 1903 Sharp, with the help of her friend and lover, Henry Nevinson, began to find work writing articles for the Daily Chronicle, the Pall Mall Gazette and the Manchester Guardian, a newspaper that published her work for over thirty years. and befriended suffragette Helen Craggs and others, Sharp did keep her promise for five years, until her mother absolved her from that promise in November 1911. Although I hope you will never go to prison, still, I feel I cannot any longer be so prejudiced, and must leave it to your better judgment. I have really been very unhappy about it and feel I have no right to thwart you, much as I should regret feeling that you were undergoing those terrible hardships. It has caused you as much pain as it has me, and I feel I can no longer think of my own feelings. I cannot write more, but you will be happy now, won't you. (Jane Sharp, letter to her daughter (November, 1911) Sharp reoriented the paper to appeal more to middle-class women, with the slogan "The War Paper for Women". Although she personally came to oppose the war, she ensured that the paper maintained a neutral stance on it. At the end of the war, the Representation of the People Act 1918 gave (some) women the right to vote and the United Suffragists, who published the newspaper disbanded, and presented Sharp with a book signed by the members. at the request of her daughter Barbara Ayrton-Gould.

In 1931, Sharp wrote a report on the International Conference on African Children which discussed child slavery and the practise of child pawning in Liberia.

In 1933 Sharp's friend Margaret Nevinson died. Soon afterwards, aged 63, she married Margaret's husband, Henry Nevinson, by then aged 77. Their love affair had lasted many years withstanding complications of friendship and marriage.

Sharp's autobiography, Unfinished Adventure, was published in 1933. It was republished by Faber in 2009.

Sharp was a member of the Women's World Committee Against War and Fascism along with Ellen Wilkinson, Vera Brittain and Storm Jameson.

Sharp died in a nursing home in Ealing on 17 June 1955.

Quotations

Reforms can always wait a little longer, but freedom, directly you discover you haven't got it, will not wait another minute.

Primary sources

Sharp's papers, including Diaries of Evelyn Sharp, 1920–37, 1942–7, are in the care of the Bodleian Library.