The Ashurst Sisters Nurturing Rebellion Across the Nineteenth Century

This group biography follows the four Ashurst sisters, contemporaries of Queen Victoria, who rebelled against the limitations of their era to become influential activists. Raised by progressive parents in a London household with few boundaries between private life and public engagement, Eliza, Caroline, Matilda, and Emilie Ashurst built sophisticated transnational networks advancing anti-slavery, Italian unification, and women's rights across Britain, Europe, and America. Through strategic marriages, literary production, and connections with revolutionaries like Giuseppe Mazzini, the family nurtured others to campaign for change. Spanning three generations (1791-1933), this book illuminates the understudied role of kinship in nineteenth-century reform movements. The Ashurst Sisters demonstrates how middle-class Victorian women could shape international culture and political discourse through strategic networking and persistent activism. Despite their formal exclusion from power, they found new ways to influence society through translating innovative texts, fundraising for causes, and publishing calls for change.

Chapter 1. Introduction: “Daring Rebels”.- PART I: THE FOUNDATIONS OF REBELLION.- Chapter 2. William H. and Elizabeth Brown Ashurst.- Chapter 3. Domestic Radicals: The Muswell Hill Brigade.- PART II: EARLY CAMPAIGNS (1840S-1850S).- Chapter 4. American Alliances and the World Anti-Slavery Convention, 1840.- Chapter 5. Rebelling with Mazzini in the Struggle for Italy.- Chapter 6. Eliza and George Sand: Rebellion in Translation.- PART III: EXPANDING HORIZONS (1850s-1880s).- Chapter 7. Visions of America.- Chapter 8. Achieving Italian Unification.- Chapter 9. Redefining British Women’s Economic and Social Equality.- Chapter 10. Fighting for British Women’s Suffrage and Political Equality.- PART IV: LAST WAVES OF ALLIANCE.- Chapter 11. Madame Venturi: “A Rebel to the Last”.- Chapter 12. Into the Twentieth Century.- Chapter 13. Conclusions.

Allison Scardino Belzer is Professor of History at Georgia Southern University, USA, specializing in modern Italy and Britain. She published Women and the Great War: Femininity under Fire in Italy with Palgrave Macmillan in 2010.