Evelyn Jane Nevinson (née Sharp; 4 August 1869 – 17 June 1955), better known as Evelyn Sharp, was a pacifist and writer who was a key figure in two major British women's suffrage societies, the militant Women's Social and Political Union and the United Suffragists. She helped found the latter and became editor of Votes for Women during the First World War. She was twice imprisoned and became a tax resister. An established author who had published in The Yellow Book, she was especially well known for her children's fiction.
Early life
Evelyn Sharp, the ninth of eleven children, was born on 4 August 1869. Cecil Sharp the folk-song collector was her elder brother. Sharp's family sent her to a boarding school. She went to a Parisian finishing school while her brothers went to university.
In 1894, against the wishes of her family, she moved to London, where she worked as a private tutor and wrote several novels including All the Way to Fairyland (1898) and The Other Side of the Sun (1900).
In 1903 Sharp, with the help of her friend and lover, Henry Nevinson, began to find work writing articles for the Daily Chronicle, the Pall Mall Gazette and the Manchester Guardian, a newspaper that published her work for over thirty years. Sharp highlights the importance of Nevinson and the Men's League for Women's Suffrage: "It is impossible to rate too highly the sacrifices that they (Henry Nevinson and Laurence Housman) and H. N. Brailsford, F. W. Pethick Lawrence, Harold Laski, Israel Zangwill, Gerald Gould, George Lansbury, and many others made to keep our movement free from the suggestion of a sex war."
