author
Ellis Ethelmer
Best known as the name behind Woman Free, this late-Victorian voice was part of a bold campaign for women’s independence. The work blends poetry and argument, turning feminist protest into something vivid and memorable.
1 Audiobook
Woman free
by Ellis Ethelmer
About the author
Ellis Ethelmer was the pseudonym used for Woman Free (1893), a book published by the Women's Emancipation Union. Library records identify the name as a joint pseudonym of Elizabeth Clarke Wolstenholme Elmy and her husband, Ben Elmy, though Elizabeth is the better-documented public figure behind the movement.
Elizabeth Clarke Wolstenholme Elmy was a major British campaigner for women's rights and suffrage, active across the later 19th and early 20th centuries. She helped found the Women's Emancipation Union, and her writing and organizing focused on legal inequality, marriage, education, and women's freedom. In Woman Free, those political commitments take poetic form, mixing passionate verse with notes and references.
Because Ellis Ethelmer was a pen name rather than a single well-documented public author, some personal details are harder to pin down with certainty. What is clear is that the name is closely tied to one of the period's outspoken feminist works, and to a wider struggle for women's emancipation in Britain.