The Suffrage Photography of Lena Connell by Colleen Denney

Author:Colleen Denney [Denney, Colleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781476681627
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2021-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

Fig. 49: Lena Connell (1875–1949), The Hon. Mrs. Evelina Haverfield, c. 1912. Photograph with Evelina Haverfield’s signature (Women’s Library, London School of Economics and Political Science).

She is dressed in riding attire, her hair pulled back off her face, which bears a serious, intent expression. Sylvia Pankhurst described her as always dressed in hunting stock of this sort. Pankhurst also observed her transformation within the ranks, possibly partly due to her aristocratic origins, but ones soon regulated by suffrage work: “When she first joined the Suffragette Movement her expression was cold and proud…. During her years in the Suffrage Movement her sympathies so broadened that she seems to have undergone a rebirth.”90 Sylvia was able to give us an accurate reading of Haverfield because she knew her well; by 1914 she had joined ELFS, a further testimony to her alteration.

To present an aristocratic woman not in evening dress like Lady Dilke in the Herkomer portrait (fig. 33), but rather in her customary attire for suffrage marches, was incredibly daring on both the part of Connell and her sitter. It declared perhaps more than her debunking of her class. She would never, in the 19th century, have been portrayed in such apparel. Perhaps it owes something to her unconventional love life, taking a stance against heterosexual presentation of self. Holme wrote a short biography of Haverfield which attests to their close relationship as horsewomen and comrades; the words on her tombstone sum up her priorities: “a good rider, a good fighter, a most loyal friend.”91

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