While pleasing to read that English Heritage plans to unveil six new plaques to women in 2020 (Artists and spies boost women in blue plaque citations, 5 March), it is tempting to say both: “About time!” and “What about all the plaques they’ve turned down?”
Citing but two: in 2019 English Heritage refused to support a plaque to the playwright Githa Sowerby (1876-1970) on her Kensington home despite the overwhelming recognition of her brilliant 1912 play Rutherford and Son, a classic that has now been produced numerous times all over the country from Salisbury to Newcastle upon Tyne since it was first rediscovered in 1980, including twice by the National Theatre, most recently on the main Lyttleton stage. In its day it was translated and produced in French, German, Dutch, Czech, Italian, Russian and Swedish and Sowerby was the only woman included in Emma Goldman’s The Social Significance of Modern Drama (1914) alongside Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw and others. Meanwhile Sowerby’s other plays are gaining increasing recognition with recent productions of The Stepmother at the Orange Tree, at Salisbury and in Canada.
While it is excellent that there will be plaques to the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and Women’s Social and Political Union, there’s still no recognition for the much-neglected Women’s Freedom League (WFL), who broke from the WSPU in 1907 and broke the law, but used non-violent means such as tax resistance and a census boycott.
In 2018 English Heritage chose to honour just the war correspondent Henry Nevinson and his artist son CRW Nevinson with a plaque on their Belsize Park home, rather than include Nevinson’s wife, the writer and campaigner Margaret Wynne Nevinson (1858-1932), a founding member of the WFL, or indeed Henry’s second wife, the writer and suffragette Evelyn Sharp (1869-1955). At the time it was suggested that this failure would shortly be recompensed with a plaque honouring the WFL. We are still waiting…
Susan Croft
London
• Barbara Hepworth, who was born in Wakefield, studied in Leeds and worked in St Ives, is to be recognised with a blue plaque. And the award goes to… oh, London, again.
Richard Webb
Sheffield
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