‘Bless the Gods for my pencils and paper’: Katie Gliddon's prison diary, Percy Bysshe Shelley and the suffragettes at Holloway

Schwan, Anne

Abstract

This article discusses the life and imprisonment of the largely unknown middle-class artist and suffrage activist Katie Gliddon and analyzes her extensive prison diary, secretly written and drawn in her copy of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley at London’s Holloway Prison in March and April 1912. By creating a platform for the voices of ‘ordinary’ prisoners and by opening up a space for a transgressive gaze between suffragettes, ‘ordinary’ prisoners and female officers, Gliddon’s writings allow us to complicate our understanding of cross-class relations within the women’s suffrage campaign and in women’s prisons more generally speaking.

Citation

Schwan, A. (2013). ‘Bless the Gods for my pencils and paper’: Katie Gliddon's prison diary, Percy Bysshe Shelley and the suffragettes at Holloway. Women's History Review, 22(1), 148-167. https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2012.724917

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Online Publication Date: Dec 7, 2012
• Publication Date: 2013-02
• Deposit Date: May 25, 2012
• Journal: Women's History Review
• Print ISSN: 0961-2025
• Electronic ISSN: 1747-583X
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 22
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 148-167
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2012.724917
• Keywords: prison writing; diary; women; suffrage movement
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/id/eprint/5328
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2012.724917