Old Baggage

Old Baggage is a novel by the British writer Lissa Evans set in 1928.

Matilda Simpkin, known as Mattie, comes across a small wooden club in a cupboard and finds herself remembering the years when she was a militant in the campaign for women's votes and was imprisoned five times. Middle age has brought her lectures on the legacy of that movement and not a great deal else. When she runs into an old fellow campaigner who has given herself to the Fascist cause, Mattie decides that a new fight has presented itself, and she turns to a younger generation of women. The group she forms is called the Amazons, and it is meant to give girls somewhere to use their bodies and their minds.

The novel sits between the history of the suffrage movement and the politics of the years before the Second World War, and its headings list suffragists, fascism, historical fiction and literary fiction. A new girl who joins the Amazons is what brings Mattie's past back into collision with her present.