... It’s impossible to summarise adequately a book so magnificent. This biography is, granted, very long at almost 1,000 pages, but a life so large merits comprehensive treatment. Unlike so many excessively long books recently published, this is not simply a collection of facts carelessly assembled; it is instead a sophisticated symphony of intriguing and complex analysis, delivered in mellifluous harmony. It’s a feminist book, as is appropriate to the subject, but feminist theory is used as a scalpel, not a sledgehammer ... there’s nothing linear about this wonderful book, but its direction is always clear. If it fails to make the shortlists of the main history prizes, I’ll be very cross indeed ... Holmes sublimely illuminates Sylvia’s extraordinary life.

... compelling ... This book digs deep into the sorrows and passions of this complex and creative woman ... This is a moving, powerful biography of a woman whose desire to connect 'with all the world' is an inspiration for our uncertain times.

After numerous historical, fictional and cinematic treatments, the story of the suffragist movement is familiar, though always captivating ... At more than 900 pages, Holmes’s book is packed with detail, but marred by so much repetition that the reader is left with the impression of a vast amount of material not fully marshaled into narrative form. At times, her paragraphs feel like notes hastily compiled and not fully digested; moments of high drama are interrupted by digressions that leave the reader grasping to fillet meaning from a barrage of information. Holmes’s writing is prone to sweeping overstatement and replete with clichés ... The word 'radical' is so overused as to lose all meaning, applied to everything from the views of W. E. B. Du Bois to an English folk ballad, from Mancunian socialism to a vegetarian restaurant ... Despite its length, Holmes’s book tends to skate over opportunities for psychological insight into its subject, in particular her personal relationships. Potentially seismic quarrels tend to be reported then resolved in the space of a few lines, with little attention paid to the erosions and ambivalences that shape dynamics over a lifetime of shared experience ... Nonetheless, no book on Sylvia Pankhurst could fail to pass on an exhilarating story.

The genius of Holmes’s fascinating and important biography is that it approaches Sylvia’s life as if she were a man. The writing isn’t prettified or leavened by amusing anecdotes about Victorian manners, it’s dense and serious, as befits a woman who never wore make-up and didn’t care about clothes. To paraphrase the WSPU’s slogan, it is about deeds not domesticity. Rather than dwelling on moods and relationships, Holmes is interested in ideas and consequences. It’s wonderfully refreshing.

Cultural historian Rachel Holmes describes Pankhurst’s all-consuming activism – which resulted in multiple imprisonments, during which she endured brutal forced feedings – in her excellent and admiring new biography, Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel ... To capture Pankhurst’s life, Holmes plumbs her subject’s published writings and private correspondence, while also benefiting from the work of other historians and access to newly available archival material. The book is long – nearly 1,000 pages ... But [Holmes'] command of the material [...] is impressive. The author vividly portrays both the sweep of events and her subject’s inner conflicts. Indeed, Holmes excels in showing how Pankhurst's mental turmoil both shaped and drove her, leading to a remarkably forward-thinking understanding of the connections between gender, class, and race.

Rachel Holmes’s new biography of Pankhurst rightly gives equal weight to the three great causes—feminism, left internationalism and anti-imperialism—to which Pankhurst devoted her life. Almost a thousand pages long, and weighing in at three and a half pounds, it is clearly intended to be the definitive Life. Disappointingly, it isn’t. It is digressive, repetitive, and rife with typographical and factual errors, but that isn’t the main problem ... The problem is rather that identification has led Holmes to echo, rather than analyse and explain, Pankhurst’s own version of her story. The first two-thirds of the book are based almost exclusively on Pankhurst’s writings, but without enough attention to the cultural tropes, political imperatives and psychological needs that shaped them. The result is a flattened and surprisingly naive account of a woman whose personal journey was painful and whose happiness in later life hard won.

Sylvia managed a remarkable personal life: Holmes shares the details with obvious enjoyment ... Rachel Holmes is a splendid biographer, delivering well over eight hundred with a graceful, engaging touch ... readers will turn the pages eagerly rather than close the book too soon, unintimidated by the ferocity of an exceptional, lifelong rebel.

... such a big life deserves a big book, especially when it is written with political understanding and tremendous sympathy for women in politics ... ylvia’s life reads like a history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She seemed, at times, to be involved in every major political event.

Holmes includes some new finds from recently opened archives and delves deeper into Pankhurst’s personal life than other biographers. But this lengthy book drifts back and forth chronologically, repeats many of the same stories, includes an exhaustive amount of political and historical background, and veers into long biographies of the hundreds of activists and politicians with whom Pankhurst interacted ... Pankhurst's life is ripe for discovery by new readers and a younger generation. However, this biography is often so dense that her story often gets lost within its pages.

Holmes’ lengthy accounts of the Pankhurst homes; the servants (often relatives in disguise); the food they ate; the new-age business Emmeline ran into the ground; the endless family feuds; and the later aspects of Sylvia’s public life feel positively Carovian. Unable to separate the person from the period, the author has written less a biography of one woman than a comprehensive account of the time in which that woman lived ... Holmes does offer fascinating specifics about Victorian lifestyle habits and the patriarchal system that, by turns, indulged and thwarted women’s progress. She also ably relates the Pankhursts’ downward slide into the working class (whose cause they’d long championed) and the death of two of Sylvia’s brothers in an age before the widespread use of antibiotics ... But Sylvia presents a biographer’s dilemma: Here is a trailblazer whose voluminous writings and bold actions should assure her place in history, but she has faded into obscurity. Yet to revive her prominence and put her achievements in proper context, the author must capture the era in which her subject lived. In portraying that era in the same exhaustive detail as she does her subject, however, Holmes has created an unfocused doorstop of a book that may intimidate casual readers ... It’s a shame because Pankhurst is a worthy subject — a bold, counterculture Brit who advocated for real social change. A slimmer, more targeted volume might have better achieved the author’s presumed goal: to make Sylvia Pankhurst once again widely known.

Holmes captures the full sweep of suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst’s career and influence on 20th-century politics in this magnificent account ... Richly textured with historical details, crackling with the vibrant personalities of major and minor figures, and interspersed with clear-eyed, incisive analyses of Pankhurst’s character and actions, this is a flat-out fabulous biography. History buffs will be mesmerized.