The more I got to know Etta, the more I found myself wondering if she was perhaps neuro-diverse, like eco campaigners Greta and Chris Packham. She pestered the RSPB’s aristocratic president Winifred, Duchess of Portland (left), to persuade Queen Alexandra (right) to denounce the fashionable egret feather (the Great and Snowy Egret was by now on the brink of extinction). Interesting that, even today, it is predominantly women who set up and run animal welfare/rescue initiatives. There is a lot of shocking detail uncovered about the trade in birds as decorative elements for Edwardian hats, so in that regard, Etta was absolutely on point. I dislike pitting women against each other, but the contrast between Etta Lemon's bird protection movement and the campaign for the vote didn't do this; the book is respectful to the views of both women, which in many ways were opposed, and is grounded in an understanding of what it was like to live as a woman at the time.

This idea was opposed by the two women assistant secretaries Beatrice Solly and Lemon's niece Phyllis Barclay-Smith.At about this time, Captain Smith left the army and became honorary secretary of the Evangelisation Society from 1868 until his death in 1899.

The book is actually only half about Etta Lemon, a woman who felt passionately that feathers/whole birds shouldn't be used to decorate hats and who was central to the founding of the RSPB. The plumed paradise birds, the great and little egret, blue-throated and amethyst hummingbirds, the bright green Carolina parakeet, the Toco toucan, the lyre bird, the silver pheasant, the velvet bird, the tanager, the resplendent trogon .I found out online that they might lay seven to eight eggs, and that only two might survive to adulthood. Her legacy is the RSPB, grown from an all-female pressure group of 1889 with the splendidly simple pledge: Wear No Feathers.

Etta Lemon follows the life of the woman responsible for the formation of the Royal Protection for the Society of Birds. Greta’s outspoken manner channels the spirit of Etta, who (as a girl) would publicly denounce any woman wearing plumage in her Blackheath family church. Etta scooped a silver medal for her speech (in fluent French) at the International Conference for Bird Protection, 1898.

I thought that this gave me a much broader understanding about Edwardian society and the anti-suffrage perspective - something I'd not considered deeply. From these and Boase’s writing, we get a good sense of out two heroines, Etta Lemon and Emmeline Pankhurst—where they came from, what drove them, and their lives, thoughts and ideas which moved in very different directions to each other.