Emily Wilding Davison

Emily Wilding Davison was the most famous suffragette to die in the battle for women’s rights after she rushed onto the Epsom racecourse in 1913 and collided with the King’s horse.

Her notorious final act of protest has for decades obscured the extraordinary life she lived and the impassioned arguments that underpinned her militancy.

In this centenary year of UK women first receiving the franchise, this biography reveals the true story of Davison’s life and times.

A middle-class governess for most of her adulthood, she pivoted towards violence, vandalism, jail time and force-feeding only in her final years.

Lucy Fisher, a Times journalist, draws on the suffragette’s own words, contemporary press reports, local histories and academic scholarship to paint a vivid picture of a strange life and a tragic finale.