Great Miss Lydia Becker

Fifty years before women were enfranchised, a legal loophole allowed a thousand women to vote in the general election of 1868. This surprising event occurred due to the feisty and single-minded dedication of Lydia Becker, the acknowledged, though unofficial, leader of the women''s suffrage movement in the later 19th century.

Brought up in a middle-class family as the eldest of fifteen children, she...