Vera Holme, known as Jack, left a career as a jobbing actress to become Emmeline Pankhurst's chauffeur and mechanic. Evelina Haverfield was a classic beauty, the daughter of a Scottish baron and fourteen years older than Jack. They met in 1908, fell in love, lived together, and became public faces of the suffragette movement, enduring prison and doing everything they could for the cause.
The First World War paused the suffragettes' campaign and Jack and Eve enrolled in the Scottish Women's Hospital Service and soon found themselves in Serbia. Eve set up and ran hospitals for allied soldiers in appalling conditions, while Jack became an ambulance driver, travelling along dirt tracks under bombardment to collect the wounded from the front lines.
Together, they carved radical new paths, demonstrating that women could do anything men could do, whether driving ambulances, running military hospitals, becoming prisoners of war or bearing arms. They refused to compromise in their sexuality - they were lifelong partners even though Jack enjoyed relationships with other women. Determined to be themselves, 'forthright, flamboyant and proud', Wendy Moore uses their story as a lens through which to view the suffragette movement, the work of women in WWI and the development of lesbian identity throughout the twentieth century.
"Richly researched...an invigorating and engaging tale, well fed by diaries and letters, and told with an unpretentious, straightforward energy of which the subjects themselves would approve" - TLS
"Had Wendy Moore been writing a novel, she could hardly have invented more fabulous leading characters than Vera 'Jack' Holme and Evelina 'Eve' Haverfield or have set her narrative in a time of greater drama...In Moore's pacey narrative, their astonishing lives once again demonstrate not only how women could seize power for themselves, but also the value of their much-underestimated resources" - Literary Review