Commemorating the Suffragette: Tracy Chevalier’s Falling Angels and Mourning the Revolutionary Feminist Past

This article examines Tracy Chevalier’s neo-Edwardian novel Falling Angels (2001) and its portrayal of the suffragette movement, focusing on its revision of traditional suffragette conversion narratives. I explore the heroine’s progression, proposing that Falling Angels engages with these narratives to resonate with contemporary feminist concerns. The protagonist’s evolution and death are interpreted as a critique of postfeminist discourses and call for the continuation of feminism. I analyze Falling Angels as a textual mourning of the feminist past and as a fictional challenge to the postfeminist view that feminism’s goals have been accomplished and the movement obsolete, arguing that the novel memorializes the suffrage movement’s revolutionary spirit.