'It wasn't like that at all': memory, identity and legacy in Jessie Kenney's The Flame and The Flood.

This article uses Jessie Kenney's unpublished and fragmentary autobiography The Flame and the Flood to show how suffragettes reacted to, and tried to re-write, the emerging historical narratives on militant suffrage. As June Purvis and Sandra Stanley Holton have shown, Sylvia Pankhurst's The Suffragette Movement became the dominant frame through which the suffragette movement was understood. Yet Krista Cowman's revealing study of Mary Gawthorpe also demonstrates that many suffragettes were distressed at the way this narrative became cemented in popular and academic understandings of the movement. Developing this understanding by showing how suffragettes resisted Pankhurst's account to offer an alternative account of suffrage history, this article offers new insights into suffrage life-writing in the later twentieth century. It conceptualises The Flame and the Flood not as a monologue focused on Kenney's own experience, but as a dialogue with existing cultural narratives, and demonstrates the interaction between collective and individual identity in suffrage autobiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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