In the grey-built city of the mind / Wave the green boughs of a few hostage powers: Eva Gore-Booth, Esther Roper and the Manchester University Settlement in Ancoats, 1896-1907

Esther Roper, a suffragist and one of the early cohorts of women graduates from Owens College, helped to set up the Manchester University Settlement in Ancoats, and a year later was joined in her work there by Eva Gore-Booth, the sister of the future Countess Markiewicz. This chapter examines the nature of their work together, how it developed in line with their work on suffrage, including their campaign against Winston Churchill's re-election in 1908, and how their work provides a new context for how we read Gore-Booth's recently republished poems, especially in her three 'Manchester' books, Unseen Kings (1904), The Egyptian Pillar (1907) and The Agate Lamp (1912).