Book Description

Ann Veronica is a twenty-two year old young woman who is studying biology at Tredgold Women's College. She is the youngest of five children, and the child her father is the hardest on. He is dictatorial and strict, and prevents Ann from making any decisions for herself. He forbids her to attend an upcoming costume ball in London, but Ann Vernica has already made plans to attend with friends, a down-at-heel family of artists she knows from her neighborhood and of whom her father would never approve. Ann Veronica is tiring of all of the restrictions her father feels able to put on her life. The night of the ball, her father oversteps the mark by using violence to prevent her from attending; she moves out of the family home in the Morningside Park area of London and takes an apartment in Hampstead. She struggles to make the rent because she is struggling to find a job, so she borrows rent money from an older man called Mr Ramage; she does not realize that she is now beholden to him for the small price of forty pounds.The forty pounds allows Ann Veronica to devote herself to her studies full time. She studies at Imperial College, London, and meets a man with whom she falls quickly in love. Capes is a demonstrator in the laboratory which ruffles Mr Ramage's feathers; he tries to rape her, which causes her to drop out of school for a while, and devote her time and energies to the cause of woman's suffrage. She joins the suffragettes, and storms Parliament, where she is arrested and imprisoned for a month.