Born in Australia, raised in Britain, and settled in the United States, Ida Alexa Ross Wylie (1885-1959) is claimed by all three as an eminent novelist and screenwriter. The author of over thirty novels, I. A. R Wylie is most recognized for the 1942 screen adaptation of her anti-fascist novel Keeper of the Flame, starring Spence Tracy and Aubrey Hepburn.
What she is less well-known for is her role as a militant suffragette. In 1911, she joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). In London, she provided a safe house where women being released from prison, could recover from the effects of their maltreatment and hunger strikes. During this time she developed a close relationship with Rachel Bennet, editor of The Suffragette. When the paper was raided, Bennet and Wylie came to the United States, where she settled in Hollywood and worked in the film industry.
Ida Wylie formed a close relationship with Dr. Sarah Josephine Baker, and in the 1930s, they settled on a farm in Stillman, New Jersey, along with Dr. Louise Pierce, where Ida passed away in 1959.
The following excerpt is from “About Myself, Book News Monthly June 1914, Vol 32, part 1, pp. 468.
I think I am the happiest person on earth. I have a charming little home of my own. I have the best friends a woman has ever had. I have work I love, sufficient the health, sufficient means. I am in a big movement. I live every day of my life to the full; I am free and yet not alone. I live according to my character, and yet I serve others and an ideal with all my strength. Yes, I am an exuberantly happy person. I feel whatever the future has in store for me, nothing can take from me the fact that I have lived and had the best that life can offer. You see, this is something in the nature of a confession!
And now for the suffrage, and a little bit about my life!
I wonder how many Americans know what a Suffragette is? Those who have heard Mrs. Pankhurst in the course of her American tours have the very best idea — those who judge by the English Press have no idea at all. If you go by the latter’s picture, you conjure up an awful vision of a wild, untidy, masculine-looking object, rushing round destroying property for the sheer love of notoriety — or out of a spiteful, imagined sub -conscious desire to “ get even ” with the fate that made her so unloved and undesired. That, no doubt, is the picture I had in my own mind before I came to England and saw things for myself— which is the only way of seeing things in their true light.
Now I know better. I have, as it were, an example in myself. For I am certainly not masculine, not of violent, excitable temperament, not fond of notoriety. I confess to a predilection for a quiet domestic life. And yet, I am a Militant Suffragette. I have been in the most desperate pitched battles with the authorities. I have defied the law and what is worse from an English point of view, every convention which governs the life of a woman.
“We must accept life for what it really is – a challenge to our quality without which we should never know what stuff we are made of or grow to our full statue.” Ida A. R. Wylie
Learn more about Ida A. R. Wylie
Read her writings
- Guttenberg I. A. R. Wylie collection
- Internet Archive I. A. R. Wylie collection
- The Future of the Novel: Famous Writers and their Methods by Meredith Starr, 1921, p. 124-125.
In “About Myself” Wylie wrote that militant women are convinced women…militant women are impatient women…and they are heroic women because they have nothing to lose?