Old Baggage

By: Lissa Evans

Narrated by: Jane Copland

Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's Summary

Number one UK best seller.

“A thoughtful, funny, companionable novel...executed with verve.” (London Times)

The author of the acclaimed Crooked Heart returns with a comic, charming, and surprisingly timely portrait of a once-pioneering suffragette trying to find her new passion in post-WWI-era London.

It's 1928. Riffling through a cupboard, Matilda Simpkin comes across a small wooden club - an old possession that she hasn’t seen for more than a decade. Immediately, memories come flooding back to Mattie - memories of a thrilling past, which only further serve to remind her of her chafingly uneventful present. During the Women's Suffrage Campaign, she was a militant who was jailed five times and never missed an opportunity to return to the fray. Now in middle age, the closest she gets to the excitement of her old life is the occasional lecture on the legacy of the militant movement.

After running into an old suffragette comrade who has committed herself to the wave of fascism, Mattie realizes there is a new cause she needs to fight for and turns her focus to a new generation of women. Thus the Amazons are formed, a group created to give girls a place to not only exercise their bodies, but their minds, and ignite in young women a much-needed interest in the world around them. But when a new girl joins the group, sending Mattie’s past crashing into her present, every principle Mattie has ever stood for is threatened. 

Old Baggage is a funny and bittersweet portrait of a woman who has never given up the fight and the young women who are just discovering it.

©2019 Lissa Evans (P)2019 HarperCollins Publishers

Old Baggage

So good, I listened twice. It's so witty and packed with wonderful characters. Love it!!

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Gets 5 stars even if it isn’t my favorite Evans

I’ve listened and re-listened to Lisa Evans’ Crooked Heart and Their Finest Hour and a Half. Both books are piercing and realistic depictions of wartime Britain, both of them surprisingly funny given how determined both are to focus on the dourness of that age. In this novel, Old Baggage, we get the backstory to Mattie Simpkin, the unforgettable former suffragette and hunger striker who featured so hugely in Crooked Heart. Lissa Evans reveals exactly how Mattie escaped the usual fate of a well-bred girl in pre Edwardian England, that is, to become a barely educated breeder for some scion of her social caste. Being a bit of an old baggage myself, I particularly appreciated how Evans tells the story of Mattie’s youth in flash-back, choosing to focus instead on the lessons the indomitable Miss Simpkin is now learning in her late middle-age. Surely this is one hero who will never hang up her spurs, or so we think at the start of the book. But it would seem even Mattie still has a few things to learn about people.

The only reason this won’t be my favorite Evans may be my fault: I wanted more! Key plot developments learned in the last chapter were handled as quick information dumps, when they merited a long chapter (or two) in their own right. That aside, Old Baggage is another reason for me to rush out and buy everything Lissa Evans ever writes. The only historical novel I’ve enjoyed as much as Evan’s work was Helen Simonson’s The Summer Before the War.

And the narrator, Jane Copland, was superb.