Scenes in the writing of ‘constance lytton and jane warton, spinster’: contextualising a cross-class dresser

Abstract

In 1910 Lady Constance Lytton cross-class dressed as Jane Warton, seamstress, to expose class discrimination in the treatment of suffragette prisoners. This act was covered in media reports, talked about by Lytton in speeches, and represented in novels. It was central to the 1914 autobiography, Prisons and Prisoners, said on the title-page to be by 'Constance Lytton and Jane Warton, Spinster'. The author analyses Lytton's idealism, her assumption of a suffragette subject-position, and the 'imaginary anatomy' which enabled her to write of her experiences as Jane Warton. The forcibly fed body of Jane Warton became a metonym for the spiritual integrity of the nurturant state proposed by the British women's suffrage movement in the early Georgian period. What is fetishised in Lytton/Warton within the women's suffrage movement is the cross-class solidarity enjoined by crossclass chivalry. The fetishisation is characterised by an oscillation between explicit celebration of the oneness of women within the movement and implicit recognition of class difference through a discriminatory, often stereotypical gaze.