Arsonist

She walked into the National Gallery on a Tuesday morning with a meat cleaver hidden in her sleeve and destroyed the most famous nude painting in Britain. Velázquez's Rokeby Venus — bought for the nation four years earlier at enormous public expense — hung in a room with a guard on the door. She stood in front of it, waited, and when the guard's attention moved she struck the canvas seven times before she was pulled off it. She gave her reason immediately and in writing: the government was destroying Emmeline Pankhurst, the most beautiful character in modern history, and she had destroyed the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythology. The gallery closed. Every museum in London reviewed who it let through the door. She was thirty.

That was one morning of a campaign. She burned a country house near Hampton Court to the ground. She bombed a railway station. She smashed windows. She was arrested nine times, sentenced to more than three years in total, and force-fed repeatedly — held down while a tube was forced into her, hundreds of times across her imprisonments — and released and re-arrested under the law that let the Home Office do exactly that. She was also, on one occasion, run over. She kept going. The point of the campaign was never property in itself; it was that a state which valued a canvas more than a woman should be made to prove it in public, and every fire and every broken window forced the demonstration again.

She came from Canada and arrived at it sideways. Born in Ontario, raised partly in Italy, she came to London young and was working as a journalist, unattached to any cause, when she saw a suffragette procession and followed it. What settled it was not theory: it was Black Friday in 1910, when women marching on Parliament were beaten and assaulted by police in the street for six hours while nobody intervened. After that she stopped believing that being reasonable was a strategy.

Afterwards, the record turns strange. She stood for Parliament three times for Labour and lost. She wrote poetry and a memoir. Then in the 1930s she joined the British Union of Fascists and became head of its women's section, before leaving it a few years later. She died in Hastings in 1961, largely forgotten, and is remembered almost entirely for eleven seconds in front of a painting.

Forget the cleaver and the fires and the nine arrests. Remember only this: she understood that the fastest way to be heard is to destroy the thing they said was priceless — and she never once destroyed anything that could bleed.