Page Turners – August 2024 review

The Page Turners book for August was ‘Old Baggage‘ by Lissa Evans. Lissa Evans first trained as a doctor and then had a career producing and directing for television before turning to writing. ‘Old Baggage‘ is her fifth novel for adults, published in 2018. She has also written a number of books for children.

The book is set mostly in 1928 and the old baggage of the title is Mattie Simpkin, a former militant suffragette who is still anxious to make a difference. In 1928 the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act was about to come into force which would give all women the right to vote rather than just those who were property owners and aged over thirty. Mattie realised that many of the young women who would become eligible to vote had little knowledge or interest in politics and she feared they would waste their hard-won right to a voice. While some of her erstwhile suffragette colleagues aimed to address this by setting up a uniformed organisation for young people with potentially fascist undertones, Mattie set up a club for young women where she encouraged them to explore their potential through everything from debating to exercise. Eventually, of course there is a stand-off between the two groups. The book also explores Mattie’s character and personal life and we find that her vulnerabilities and emotional baggage threaten to derail her vision for the young women that put their trust in her.

We all enjoyed this book. We found the characters to be engaging and the historical detail meant we all learnt a little bit more about this period. We were able to contrast Mattie’s life with that of characters from this period that we met in our June book. We discussed what we thought would happen next in Mattie’s life without realising at the time that the book is a prequel and therefore we have the opportunity to learn about Mattie’s old age in Lissa Evans’ book called ‘Crooked Heart‘. We also talked about the courage of suffragettes and whether we had ever been militant for a cause.

As always, some of us have bought copies of the book so do get in touch if you would like to swap our page turner for one of your own.

Deborah Wallis, convenor