Cricket's "golden age" ran from the start of an official county championship in 1890 to the outbreak of the First World War. In sports literature, it acquired a similar mythic status to the single-sex boarding schools portrayed in boys' literature where, as George Orwell wrote, "everything is safe, solid and unquestionable" and "will be the same for ever and ever". In that innocent world, the sun always shone and applause rippled politely around the county grounds. Upstanding, manly batsmen, with initials before their names to denote their amateur status, played flowing cover drives, with a cavalier disregard for results. In cricket, as in English society generally, everyone knew their place. Amateurs, accommodated in separate dressing rooms from the working-class professionals, invariably provided the captains of county clubs. Women, if they intruded at all, made tea.
If cricket represented pre-1914 England at its most complacent and insular, the suffragettes, coming mainly from the ranks of the well-to-do, represented the most unexpected challenge to its safety and solidity. Their movement, as George Dangerfield observed in The Strange Death of Liberal England, was about more than the vote: it was about overthrowing "that personal security that had kept women lurking for so long behind the coat-tails of their men".
This beautifully constructed novel imagines a romance between a cricketer and a suffragette. During a cricket match, Constance Callaway – who inherits her enthusiasm for the game from her late father – meets Will Maitland, a university friend of her cousin and his county's latest batting star. They are attracted, but quarrel almost immediately when she offers advice on his batting technique. "It was a shock to him, for he came of a class and generation of men who were disposed to regard a lady's opinion as merely decorative… The temerity of the girl!" Far from being apologetic, she feels triumphant at "the look of surprise that seized Will's countenance".
Connie is already a suffragette, albeit one who will march and attend meetings but not yet resort to violence. When her friend and fellow suffragette Lily turns a West End shopping expedition into a window-smashing spree, she tries to dissuade her from such recklessness. But as Lily is arrested, Connie finds herself unwittingly caught up in the mayhem and flees from the police. She takes refuge in the Savoy Hotel where she runs into Will, who improvises a disguise and smuggles her out.
Will behaves as a chivalrous gentleman should, but he is not converted to the suffragette cause nor even led to an understanding of it. Despite several further encounters with Connie, he never is. He doesn't bother to vote and holds no political views beyond loyalty to king and country. Yet he has his own code of honour, which compels him to reject the offer of the county captaincy because the club committee wants to sack his mentor, friend and opening partner, fading former Test star AE Tamburlain, known as "the Great Tam". Later, as an officer in France in 1915, Will braves the wrath of a senior commander by denouncing a battle plan as so flawed that it will lead to the certain death of the men under Will's command. But he will not go as far as outright mutiny..
The novel, though narrated in the third person, is told alternately through the thoughts and observations of Will and Connie. Though the attraction never fades – and the fate of their relationship is not conclusively resolved even at the end – each, to the other, is almost a caricature: the pompous, narrow-minded figure of male authority against the impulsive, almost hysterical feminist. Nearly all others in the novel – for example, Connie's emotional, overbearing mother – are wholly mysterious, their thoughts and motives hidden from the reader as from Connie and Will themselves. There is one exception: Tam, a figure based on Middlesex and England batsman AE Stoddart, the most glamorous batsman of the 1890s. Just once, we are allowed an insight into his mind, but that only comes – courtesy of a shocking letter – after his death.
"Weren't we all, in the end, a mystery to each other?" Will reflects after reading it. That was true a century ago, in a world stifled by the inhibitions and conventions that Quinn brings vividly to life. Yet, the author hints, it may still be true now.
