Peruse her biography:

The Busy Autumn

Part I: The Tolkein Reconciliation
Part II: The Gorcharp Retribution

The Busy Autumn (1919)
Part II: The Gorcharp Retribution
(a.k.a. Penelope’s Revenge)

The Viscountess Nancy Astor, one of the beautiful Langhorne sisters born in Greenwood, Virginia, became a loyal British subject when she married parliamentarian Waldorf Astor in 1906. Lady Astor had learned all she could about Emily after the infamous sedition case of 1908. Yet despite Emily’s virulent anti-British sentiments, Nancy admired Chesley’s feminist writings and thought she might offer helpful counsel on how ‘a lady’ could win the coveted Plymouth seat. (1) The election was to be held on November 28, and polls taken in late October had Lady Astor trailing the Labour candidate and the two rival Conservative candidates contesting the seat. She desperately needed an edge.

Viscountess Nancy Astor -- an important figure in women's suffrage, British politics, and English pencilectomies.

Ironically, none other than Lord Reginald Pustule Gorcharp (‘Mimsy’ to his closest associates), one of Waldorf’s closest political allies, suggested to Nancy that she might find such an edge in Emily Chesley. Lord Gorcharp, a retired member of the Privy Council, advised that the tactics Emily employed with him during the sedition trial would, indeed, be of use to a woman seeking political office. (2)

Lady Astor had learned through Hugo Dyson that Emily was lodging at the home of John Tolkien near Oxford. She sent a telegram urging Emily to rush immediately to Plymouth and help during the critical final stages of the campaign. "Do it not for the Empire, but for its reform," Astor’s telegram pleaded. "Your global sisterhood looks to you in our greatest hour of need." The message resonated with Emily who had long been an advocate of the suffrage movement, and she decided to help. Women had been making some impressive gains in the more progressive countries of Europe. Women in Finland had won the vote in 1906, the Norwegians had done so in 1913, and in February 1919 the International Woman’s Suffrage Conference had convened in Paris. In fact, French women were preparing to vote for the first time in a legislative election at the same time Britain was heading to the polls. However, British women under 30 still didn’t have the vote, and that irked Lady Astor for one simple reason. In the country of her birth, Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby was drawing up the wording for the 19^th Amendment to the United States’ Constitution that would proclaim American women had a right to vote.

Astor Manor, at Kneelingdowne-by-the-Sea, Devon

Upon Emily’s arrival at Astor’s manor, Kneelingdowne-by-the-Sea, Nancy was profuse in her thanks and most eager to learn more about Chesley’s "powerful tactics of persuasion" to which Lord Gorcharp had mysteriously alluded. When Emily gradually pieced together that it was the heinous Mimsy who had mockingly suggested that her "services" be employed to aid Lady Astor’s election bid, she could barely contain her outrage. But maintain her composure she did, for the seed of a brilliant plot to exact her long-awaited revenge from the British Empire’s "chief dung beetle" had instantly planted itself in Chesley’s fertile imagination. She agreed to assist Lady Astor on one condition: a masquerade ball would be held at Kneelingdowne-by-the-Sea following a successful election result. Though unorthodox, especially for a Conservative political party, that was precisely Chesley’s point. Lady Astor had to send a clear message to Britain’s ruling class that women had a different, more imaginative and delightful way of doing things. Nancy accepted the condition and Emily set to work.

What ultimately turned the electoral tide in favour of Lady Astor was a new campaign slogan and accompanying literature outlining her political platform, both written by Chesley. The slogan – Fancy Nancy! – was complemented by a tersely worded pamphlet entitled Stand Up and Be Counted! that was widely distributed to households in Plymouth where women over 30 were known to reside. That particular segment of the electoral population had failed in the past to exercise the franchise to its fullest capacity, and Chesley gambled that some of her trademark vitriol might jar them from their apathetic slumber. In the pamphlet, she urged "fatalistic hags" to "get off their lard arses" and vote for Lady Astor. Tearing a page straight from her famous speech to the Canadian Congress of Speculationists, Chesley proclaimed that future generations of women wouldn’t stand a hope of gaining full political equality in "Britain’s autocratic regime, rife with paterfamilias ethic" unless a woman of Lady Astor’s virtue and integrity was elected to Parliament. Emily suggested, also, that women threaten to withhold performance of "certain household and matrimonial services should the wrong candidate find his way into office."

While offensive to many, Chesley’s gamble paid off. Stand Up and Be Counted stirred a few of the over-30 female electorate from their indifference, but throngs of male constituents were heard humming the Fancy Nancy! campaign ditty (also penned by Emily) on their way to the polls. Lady Astor swept into office as the first woman to ever sit in the British parliament, beating the Labour candidate by 5,203 votes and winning a majority over the combined votes of her two Conservative rivals by a count of 1,004. Though the gender split of the vote will never be known, The Devon Horn quoted one male voter as saying: "Of course I fancy Nancy. She seems like an honest woman and a fine candidate to boot. Besides, I’ve conferred on the matter with my mates over many a pint at the local pub and it’s generally agreed that she has us poor bastards by the short and curlies. What choice, pray tell, do we have?"

What choice, indeed. On the evening of the election, the promised masquerade ball got under way at Kneelingdowne-by-the-Sea where Emily would later offer the dastardly Lord Gorcharp a fateful choice of his own – one he would make in the heat of the moment and live to rue the rest of his days.

When the election results became known at Fancy Nancy! headquarters, Emily congratulated Lady Astor on her victory then feigned a sudden illness, regretfully excusing herself from the celebrations. However, before retiring from the pandemonium, she surreptitiously added a single name to the guest list for the masquerade: Penelope Fullalove. Being a master of disguise (see Abdullah the naughty Kurdish camel boy in "East of Etonne"and Helmer Hanssen in "The Bipolar Years") Emily’s ploy entailed transforming herself into a sultry vixen (not much of a stretch) who would claim to be a philatelist from Philadelphia. ‘Penelope’s’ ruse would be that she had come to England to document how Lady Astor’s historic achievement might earn her place on a postage stamp. However, her true objective would be to seduce Lord Gorcharp into a most vulnerable position.

Much of what transpired that night between Mimsy and Penelope (at least that which happened in public view) was recorded in the detailed journal entry of Hilda Matheson, a renowned lesbian who served as Lady Astor’s political secretary:

What happened next, within the privacy of Lord Astor’s study, was faithfully recorded in Emily’s memoirs, Speculations:

November 28, 1919 – Kneelingdowne-by-the-Sea:

Exhausted by the exceedingly successful Fancy Nancy! campaign and the subterfuge of its subsequent activities, Emily ventured to Lillehammer for some much needed rest and relaxation. For the next several months, she helped train members of the Norwegian National Yachting Club for the VII Olympic Summer Games that would get under way that summer in Antwerp, teaching them the Indian relaxation techniques that had served her so well in the past. (4)

But just weeks after the Games opened, Ireland – to which Emily had not returned since emigrating to America some 51 years previously – beckoned. Militant Irish nationalists, well-armed and protesting British rule, were waging bloody battles against Unionist mobs in the streets of Belfast. Once again, the tyranny of the British Empire provoked the dreaded ire of Emily. Owing Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Fein, a favour for the support he had provided her during the sedition trial, she packed her frolics trunks and headed north to the fabled land of her birth.

<...Back to Part 1

"Scholarship" by Bruce "The Invisible Guy" Trevor

Next Chapter: The Indigestible Years...>.

Foothills Footnotes:

1) The seat had been vacated by her husband Walford, a Conservative, who had recently been elevated to the House of Lords. [back]

2) Gorcharp, of course, did not reveal to Lady Astor the salacious nature of the persuasion tactics so expertly employed by Emily during the sedition trial. [back]

3) Dr. Serge Voronoff, a Russian who trained and spent his working life in Paris, was one of two dubious medical practitioners of the day who had begun affixing the gonads of goats and monkeys to the testes of deranged men seeking to restore their sagging pep. Emily would later write about Voronoff and the other quack, an American snake-oil salesman and flim-flam artist named Dr. John Brinkley, in her novel The Grafters (Shrinking Lilly Press, 1927).[back]

4) The Norwegian yachtsmen would win more medals – 11 in total, seven of them Gold – than any other nation, the country’s best ever result of any Olympic Games to date. [back]