Full disclosure, I’ve been a fan of Tina Jackson since first reading her wonderful novel, The Beloved Children. That novel, like this one, brings history to life with characters so real, complex and interesting you find yourself compelled to keep reading to learn their full story. 

Spirit Burns takes a rich and transformative moment in British history told from the point of view of the Suffragettes, an often neglected driving force for change that fueled cultural and class upheaval in early 20th century Britain. The lives of the woman portrayed are offered in relation to the shocking need for women of that period to be released from the bonds, legal and cultural, that kept them subservient and far poorer than their male counterparts in British society. 

Spirit Burns focuses on the lives of three women who represent Britain’s stagnant class structure of the period in question. These women—a mill worker, a stage performer and a young lady of the upper class—all suffer from British society’s endemic lack of opportunity for those of the “fairer sex” to express themselves, manage their affairs and grow as active partners and competitors to the males who dominate and control their lives. Their at-times militant struggle for the vote serves as an apt metaphor for all the power they were consistently denied on a day to day basis. Nothing holds them down more than the lock-tight grip of poverty and reduced opportunity that was the lot of woman up until the 1920’s.

Miss Jackson is as deft with words as she is in building characters and events you can believe in. And most especially skilled, the reader will discover, in allowing language and common parlance to clearly portray distinctions in class and lifestyles.

Spirit Burns is literature at its finest! I recommend it unhesitatingly.