On the night of April 2, 1911, a woman hid in a broom cupboard in the crypt beneath the Palace of Westminster so that the national census the following morning would have to record her address as the House of Commons. Emily Wilding Davison had started out doing everything a clever young woman was told to do. She won a bursary to Royal Holloway, then lost it when her father died and her mother could no longer cover the twenty pounds a term. She worked as a live-in governess to fund her own education, got to Oxford, and took first-class honours in English, at which point Oxford declined to give her a degree because she was a woman. She had run the race, hit the qualifying time, and been told at the line that the medal was not for her.

Her Oxford reading gave her the frame she would use for the rest of her life. She had immersed herself in medieval literature, in Chaucer, in chivalry and honour and religious martyrdom, and when the institutional doors closed she stepped into that story rather than out of it. She joined the militant WSPU in 1906, quit teaching in 1909, and worked largely unpaid. She threw stones at ministers’ cars. After Black Friday in 1910, when police assaulted a delegation of suffragettes outside Parliament, she smashed the windows of the Crown Office. She pioneered dropping burning material into public post boxes, a tactic extreme enough that her own leadership sometimes cut her loose for acting without authorization.

• She was arrested nine times, went on hunger strike seven times, and was force-fed 49 times, a procedure designed to break the will through physical torture.
• Barricaded in her cell at Strangeways to avoid another feeding, guards broke her window and hosed her with freezing water until it stood six inches deep. She sued them for it from inside prison and won 40 shillings.
• In 1912 she threw herself from a prison balcony onto iron stairs, and wrote afterward that one great tragedy might save many others. She had concluded a life was the only currency the government would count.
• The suicide reading of the Derby does not survive the evidence: she was carrying a return ticket to London, a diary full of appointments, and a ticket to a dance that evening. Frame-by-frame analysis of the newsreel suggests she was reaching to pin a suffragette flag to the King’s horse.