Old Baggage by Lissa Evans, review: This prequel to Crooked Heart is a delight from start to finish

★★★★★

Lissa Evans is that rarest of gems amongst writers: not just a real storyteller, but one who makes the entire process seem effortlessly simple. Old Baggage is a prequel to her previous novel, the Second World War-set Crooked Heart, which opened with a prologue featuring a character named Mattie Simpkin, a one-time militant suffragette and independent “new woman” now in the grip of dementia.

Interestingly, rather than taking readers back to Mattie’s prime – when she and her comrades marched, protested, smashed windows, heckled Winston Churchill and played cat and mouse in and out of Holloway Prison – Old Baggage begins in the late 1920s, when Mattie’s already middle aged.

Although no longer in the first flush of youth, she’s no less vital or energetic, a “one-woman battalion”. Our heroine is still eager to make a difference, particularly when it comes to encouraging a younger generation not to squander the freedoms she and others won for them. When faced with young women – from all classes – who have little interest in politics or the great women of history (“How could these girls be rescued from the fog in which they were currently wandering, without recourse to the shallow sparkle of film stars?”), she sets up a club for them.

Given it’s the centenary of the Representation of the People Act 1918 (which gave women of property over the age of 30 the right to vote), a suffragette novel would have been the obvious choice. But Evans makes the much more interesting decision to include the 1928 act in her narrative – that which gave women electoral equality with men: a vote if they were over the age of 21, regardless of whether they owned property or not.

Take Mattie’s friend, the Flea, who lives with Evans’ heroine, for example. “Forty-nine years old, a qualified sanitary Inspector, a scrupulous taxpayer, and yet still, by dint of her lacking a property qualification, denied the most basic right of the citizen. Doesn’t that make you absolutely boil with the injustice,” Mattie fumes.

This, like all the historical detail in the novel, is seamlessly incorporated into the narrative, another rare but prized skill. Evans explores the middling years, both in terms of women like Mattie’s own lives – “old baggage” is what some of the less kind youngsters call Mattie, this rather strange woman who loves nothing more than a tramp around Hampstead Heath, swinging her wooden clubs for exercise – and the interwar years themselves, a period of mourning as even darker storm clouds gather overhead.

Mattie is a glorious creation, all “vim and wit” of the like she wants to kindle in her “Amazons”, the band of young girls she instructs in all manner of unladylike skills from debating to callisthenics during their weekly meetings on the heath. As loveable as she is, she’s not without her flaws, and the book’s title is also a reference to certain emotional baggage Mattie’s carrying with her, which comes to threaten her principles.

Moving, funny and the most satisfying of reads, Old Baggage is a delight from start to finish.

‘Old Baggage’ is published by Doubleday