Charlotte Despard

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Standard Name: Despard, Charlotte
Birth Name: Margaret Charlotte French
Married Name: Margaret Charlotte Despard
Indexed Name: C. Despard
Indexed Name: Mrs M. C. Despard
Nickname: Madame Desperate
CD , who wrote and published during almost sixty years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, began with romantic novels, then allowed her already existent interest in political issues to percolate into her fiction. From the time of the suffrage struggle she became an editor, a prolific journalist, and a pamphleteer. Some of her poetry reached print when she was in her nineties. Despite her great importance to the suffrage struggle and to Irish and other left-wing politics of her several generations, her diaries and letters remain unpublished.
Black-and-white photo of Charlotte Despard speaking at an anti-fascist rally in at Trafalgar Square in London, c 1930s. She is kneeling forward with her left arm and her waist and her right arm hooked forward in a fist.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
politics Maude Royden
Through her anti-war activities, MR became involved with the Women's International League (WIL) , a pacifist organisation founded by British women who had attended the Women's International Congress in Amsterdam in 1915. Back in England...
politics Christopher St John
She was arrested in 1909 for setting a pillar box on fire. She worked for the Women's Social and Political Union , the Writers' Franchise League (which she helped found), the Catholic Women's Suffrage Society
politics Eva Gore-Booth
The congress was organized by a pacifist group that had split from the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS ) over the issue of supporting the British war effort. Margaret Llewelyn Davies ,...
politics Sarah Grand
In an interview in 1896, SG made clear her belief in the need for female suffrage: We shall do no good until we get the Franchise, for however well-intentioned men may be, they cannot understand...
Occupation Inez Bensusan
Organisers chose to present two feminist plays by men, Woman on Her Own by Eugène Brieux , translated by Charlotte Shaw (Bernard Shaw 's wife), and A Gauntlet by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson .
Hirshfield, Claire. “The Woman’s Theatre in England: 1913-1918”. Theatre History Studies, Vol.
15
, pp. 123-37.
125-6
All...
Friends, Associates Naomi Jacob
NJ met Charlotte Despard during the days of the suffrage struggle, and later as an actress on tour visited her at Roebuck House in Clonskeagh, not long after Ireland became independent. The cabman driving...
Friends, Associates Constance Lytton
Mary Neal , a leader in the folk-dance revival and joint founder with Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence of the Esperance Club for working girls, invited CL to holiday with herself and some of the girls in autumn...
Friends, Associates Mary Gawthorpe
During her time with the WSPU, MG worked with Christabel Pankhurst (who was twenty-four when Gawthorpe first met her, before she had yet met Isabella Ford ), whom, like Ethel Snowden , she knew from...
Friends, Associates Maud Gonne
In her later years MG confirmed her friendships with a number of politically-involved women such as Charlotte Despard (with whom she shared a house for more than a decade), Constance Markiewicz , and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington
Family and Intimate relationships Mrs Alexander
Her father, Robert French , was a solicitor from a Roscommon family. He was fond of hunting and sports in general.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Black, Helen C. Notable Women Authors of the Day. D. Bryce.
59
The French family which produced writer and suffragist Charlotte Despard was said to...
Family and Intimate relationships Katharine Bruce Glasier
KBG 's husband, John Bruce Glasier , fell ill in 1915 with cancer of the bowel. The combined physical and psychological demands of travelling, writing, and speaking for the cause finally took their toll under...

Timeline

12 September 1936: Charlotte Haldane edited the first issue...

Building item

12 September 1936

Charlotte Haldane edited the first issue of Woman Today for the Women's Committee for Peace and Democracy .

Texts

No bibliographical results available.