Not quite a biography or a personal history, Eliza Orme’s Ambitions, as Leslie Howsam states, is a “research memoir” (1). Interwoven among the details of Eliza Orme’s life are vignettes of Howsam’s own: her introduction to Orme in a seminar during her M.A., her frustration at the lack of supervisors willing to oversee a Ph.D. in women’s history in the 1980s, the collaborations that changed her life. Though the main focus is on Orme, Howsam’s references to her own research career demonstrate both how far women’s rights have come since Orme’s time and how far we still have to go to achieve true equality.

Orme was the first woman in England to earn an LL.B. and an active women’s rights campaigner, but has been largely overlooked by historians. Howsam attributes this to Orme’s “noticeably practical” nature, a stark contrast to the “visionaries” we now recognize as leaders of the first wave feminist movement (2). Howsam speculates that Orme believed women’s suffrage would inevitably come about in the 1880s and 1890s, in the prime of her life. She sought, therefore, not to overturn entire political systems, but to build a C.V. that would fast-track her to Westminster. This led to the ideological clash for which she is most infamous: the argument with Rosalind Howard, Countess of Carlisle, over whether the Women’s Liberal Federation (W.L.F.) should demand that the Liberal Party put women’s suffrage in their platform. As Howsam describes it, Howard and her allies engaged in underhanded tactics to stack the W.L.F. Council with electors who would vote to demand the party adopt a pro-suffrage platform. Orme’s faction resigned in protest, splitting the women’s auxiliary. Despite accusations to the contrary, Howsam argues, Orme was not anti-suffrage, but, rather, was more invested in protecting the electoral chances of the Liberal Party. Indeed, perhaps most devastating to Orme was not the schism itself, but the end of the “‘practical’ objectives” she had for the organization, as a tool for recruiting canvassers for Liberal candidates and a place where women could develop organizational and oratorical skills (93).

Orme had withdrawn from public life, possibly suffering from dementia, by the time women won the right to sit in Parliament and to practice law in 1919. Hers is in many ways a story of ambition stymied, though Howsam argues Orme is “worth remembering…for what she did do, not for what she did not” (131). Orme wanted to work as a barrister, but tradition barred her from completing the necessary apprenticeship. She was forced, instead, to work as a barrister’s “‘devil,’” accepting half-fees to prepare conveyancing and estate-related documents on behalf of male barristers, though she did file patents and financial services paperwork in her own right (45). When historians and activists celebrating the centenary of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act pointed to Orme, it was as an example of someone who wanted to be a lawyer and had failed. Howsam urges us to think of Orme instead as someone who successfully pushed against social and legal boundaries. A chapter on journalism and authorship reveals that though she served as the editor of the Women’s Gazette and Weekly News, the organ of the W.L.F., published extensively in both feminist and mainstream papers, and possibly even wrote leaders for the Weekly Dispatch, these achievements had little staying power beyond her lifetime. However, Howsam argues, Orme’s recognition that “women’s issues and women’s politics were not limited to the suffrage question,” at a time when other activists frequently overlooked issues like labor rights, marriage reform, and property rights, make her a figure worth remembering (92). Though recent scholarship has shown the interests of first-wave feminists, especially working-class women, involved more than just suffrage, Howsam is not wrong to emphasize that Orme might have been somewhat unique among middle-class activists.

Howsam is convincing in her argument about Orme’s pragmatism. Though a lack of evidence forces her to “speculate (responsibly) and imagine (intuitively)” to fill in the gaps of Orme’s life, her argument about Orme’s political ambitions seems plausible (25). However, some of these speculations are better evidenced than others. For example, Howsam is “quite prepared to entertain the idea” that Orme and her life-long friend, Reina Lawrence, were lovers, based on the strength of Orme making Lawrence the executor of her will, leaving Lawrence her real estate, and a letter Orme sent to Samuel Alexander asking him not to interrupt an all-women’s weekend in Ballachulish at which Lawrence was possibly in attendance (65). She acknowledges that there is no “incontrovertible evidence” of their relationship, but thinks nonetheless that “it was probably a lesbian partnership,” an argument I do not find fully convincing (66).

Eliza Orme’s Ambitions is largely readable and full of interesting tidbits about not just Orme, but also what it was like to be a young feminist scholar in the 1980s. Most intriguingly for historians of women, it offers a fresh take on the breakdown of the Women’s Liberal Federation, giving us a more nuanced perspective of the ideological and personal quarrels that beset the organization. The structure of the book sometimes detracts from Howsam’s otherwise clear writing. More thematic than chronological, it can sometimes be hard to follow what events happened when. Howsam should be commended for publishing an open-access book, though one might question her decision to forgo references. To her credit, she is always careful to acknowledge the work of other scholars who have influenced her own. A fuller bibliography would, nonetheless, help this book to act as the connective tissue between the disparate political issues in which Orme herself was most interested, including Home Rule, women’s suffrage, and labor reform. Regardless, however, this book is an excellent addition to the field. It serves as a model for the kinds of exploratory scholarship that are now possible with digital databases like the British Newspaper Archive. Moreover, it offers an excellent jumping off point for new research on the history of women’s rights, Liberal politics, and British legal history.