Millicent Garrett Fawcett presided over the suffrage movement in Great Britain for almost sixty years and therefore occupies a pivotal place in the history of British feminism. Although known for her robust leadership of the battle for suffrage, she was also engaged in reform of moral conduct, women's work, and women's education. Her life and writing afford an introduction to many reform questions about late-Victorian and Edwardian England.

Millicent Garrett was the seventh of the ten children of Newson Garrett and Louisa Dunnell. Her father ran a prominent business based on several profitable concerns: a gas works, maltings, shipyards, and a thriving merchant trade in coal and corn. The family spent summers at Alde House in the seaside resort town of Aldeburgh in East Anglia; in winter the Garretts lived at Snape, a nearby village dominated by the familys malting business.

In her autobiographical novel Janet Doncaster (1875) Fawcett...