Jack and Eve - Two Suffragettes in Love and at War by Wendy Moore

A groundbreaking account of two suffragettes who lived wild and brave lives together during the First World War and beyond.
 
Vera Holme, known as Jack, left a career as a jobbing actress to become Emmeline Pankhurst's chauffeur and mechanic. Evelina Haverfield was a classic beauty, the daughter of a Scottish baron and fourteen years older than Jack. They met in 1909, fell in love, lived together, and became public faces of the suffragette movement, enduring prison and doing everything they could for the cause.

The First World War paused the suffragettes' campaign and Jack and Eve enrolled in the Scottish Women's Hospital Service and soon found themselves in Serbia. Eve set up and ran hospitals for allied soldiers in appalling conditions, while Jack became an ambulance driver, travelling along dirt tracks under bombardment to collect the wounded from the front lines. Together, they carved radical new paths, demonstrating that women could do anything men could do, whether driving ambulances, running military hospitals, becoming prisoners of war or bearing arms.

They refused to compromise in their sexuality - they were lifelong partners even though Jack enjoyed relationships with other women. Determined to be themselves, 'forthright, flamboyant and proud', Wendy Moore uses their story as a lens through which to view the suffragette movement, the work of women in WWI and the development of lesbian identity throughout the twentieth century.
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'An astounding untold story about women's role in the thick of the fighting in the First World War. I had no idea so many women boldly volunteered for such hardship. In telling Jack and Eve's love story, Wendy Moore reveals a whole lesbian culture hidden in plain sight amid death and daring'. -- Polly Toynbee,
 
'Had Wendy Moore been writing a novel, she could hardly have invented more fabulous leading characters than Vera 'Jack' Holme and Evelina 'Eve' Haverfield or have set her narrative in a time of greater drama'.― Literary Review
 
'The lovers at the centre of Wendy Moore's dynamic dual biography upend any preconceptions the reader might bring to their story...A rip-roaring story characterised by old-fashioned courage' -- Hephzibah Anderson ― Daily Mail