The Cause.

Notes

First edition, first impression, a scarce presentation copy, inscribed on the front free endpaper "To Edith Badcock with love from Agnes & Ray Christmas 1928". "Agnes" is Strachey's close friend and fellow suffrage campaigner Agnes Garrett (1845-1935), older sister of Millicent Garrett Fawcett, to whom the book is dedicated.

Agnes also had a hand in presenting copies of Strachey's later biography of Millicent (1931), a small number of which are known to have had labels reading "Presented by Miss Agnes Garrett in memory of her sister Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett" (in a few cases the printer of said labels misidentifying their relationship as daughter-mother). Copies of either work personally inscribed thus are genuinely uncommon; we cannot trace another in recent commercial history. We have been unable to identify the recipient, but that they were well enough known to Agnes and Ray to receive an inscribed Christmas present in the year of publication seems clear.

The Cause was Strachey's "best-known and most successful book" (ODNB) and was for many decades regarded as the classic account of the English women's movement. "While acknowledging in a limited way the importance of the militants, it established a version of the suffrage movement that endorsed the views and celebrated the role of Millicent Fawcett and the NUWSS" (ODNB).