Do unto others

Where radical women are featured in fiction of the Russian revolutionary movements, how is their political agency portrayed? Are these accurate reflections of a revolutionary woman’s lived experiences and, if not, how can we ensure the historical fiction we produce better mirrors historical reality, particularly in light of the way they’ve been ignored in the canonical historical record? My PhD novel, Do Unto Others, explores the way women’s emotions, especially social anger, led them to revolutionary action in early twentieth-century Russia, its influence on their political agency. Exploring a woman’s socialist conversion and radicalisation in the Russian revolutionary underground in the years leading up to Bloody Sunday and the 1905 revolution, it focuses on her relationship with rage, learning to understand, control, and utilise it in a political (and, to a lesser extent, personal) context. While most fiction of the Russian revolutionary movement centres on upper-class, apolitical heroines, I wanted to address the gap where their radical sisters should be. In order to more accurately reflect the complex nature of Russian revolutionary women, it was vital to use as a foundation lives of their real-life counterparts, particularly in the form of memoirs, to gain insight into their thoughts, feelings, and motivations throughout their political careers, with particular interest in ways the female revolutionary experience was similar or distinctly different to that of her male comrades. The critical component explores the representations of women’s revolutionary anger, or lack thereof, in novels by Andrew Williams and Simon Montefiore, and how the denial of women’s political anger is both problematic and misleading. I explore how anger is portrayed within the context of the novels and compare them against the female radicals’ first-hand accounts. The wider social representations of women’s anger, both in a historical and modern setting, becomes a means of understanding how these authors developed their impressions of female anger.