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Hundreds of jailed suffragettes were now trying to provoke the government by launching hunger strikes in prison. In response, the authorities ordered that they be force-fed. Hardie denounced force-feeding in Parliament and more than 100 doctors signed a protest, all to no avail. He desperately tried to persuade Sylvia to stop going on hunger strikes. As an agitator, he understood the tactic, but as her lover, he was horrified. "He told me," Sylvia later wrote, "that the thought of forcible feeding was making him ill." Weren't there enough martyrs to the cause already, he asked. "Of what use to make one more?"

Sylvia wanted to be a martyr for the cause, however, and repeatedly pushed her body to the limit. And there could be no question of her breaking ranks with her hunger-striking mother or WSPU comrades. On one occasion, she was so weak on being released from jail that she had to be carried on a stretcher to a suffrage rally, where she managed to say only a few words before being taken home by ambulance. Once she smuggled a desperate message out to the mother whose love and esteem she craved: "I am fighting, fighting, fighting. I have four, five and six wardresses every day as well as the two doctors. I am fed by stomach tube twice a day. They prise open my mouth with a steel gag, pressing it in where there is a gap in my teeth. I resist all the time. My gums are always bleeding.... My shoulders are bruised with struggling whilst they hold the tube into my throat."

Nothing Sylvia did or said, however, could change the emotional balance in the Pankhurst family. As long as she could remember, she had felt in the shadow of her famous mother and the favored elder sister with the china-doll good looks, whose face had even been sculpted for the famous Tussaud waxworks. Given that history, Keir Hardie's love and respect must have felt doubly affirming, and given her desire to be in the public eye, it must have been heady to find that several issues she had suggested were raised by Hardie in the House of Commons.

Both of them had strong reasons to keep their love concealed. Hardie was, after all, a married man, with powerful right-wing enemies who would have been delighted to see him enmeshed in public scandal over an affair with a woman half his age. To make things more thorny for them both, it was soon after Hardie took up with Sylvia that the Pankhursts left his Independent Labour Party, vociferously spurning all alliances with male MPs. Sylvia remained one of the WSPU's most outspoken campaigners, so for the Pankhursts any disclosure of the affair would have proved politically as well as personally embarrassing, guaranteed fodder for anti-suffrage cartoonists. Emmeline, who carefully balanced her militance by always presenting herself as a well-dressed, respectable widow, was particularly dismayed. Once when Sylvia was on a hunger strike in prison, she smuggled out to Emmeline a letter for Hardie that her mother did not deliver. Sylvia never forgave her.

Although the war Hardie feared did not yet seem imminent, suspicion of Germany pervaded popular culture. In 1906, a novel called The Invasion of 1910 was serialized in the Daily Mail; the newspaper advertised it by sending men in spiked Prussian helmets, wearing sandwich boards, through the London streets. The book was a sensation and helped launch a whole fantasy literature of invasion. Another novel depicted the imperial German black-eagle banner flying over Buckingham Palace, the British King exiled to Delhi, and signs declaring it verboten to walk on the grass in Hyde Park. A play about an invasion by "the Emperor of the North" opened in London in 1909 and was still running 18 months later. So many invasion novels flooded the bookstores that the humorist P. G. Wodehouse satirized them with one of his own, The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England, featuring an attack by the Swiss navy and the Chinese seizure of the Welsh port of Lllgxtplll.

Meanwhile, preparations for possible