The Love of My Life

The United Kingdom is governed by Parliament, a legislature that consists of the sovereign, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons. A member of Parliament (MP) is an elected member of the House of Commons. Since Parliament’s formation in 1707, MPs have traditionally been male landowners. However, in 1918 women were given the right to vote and to become MPs. Despite this change in the rules, women have been the minority in Parliament. In 2020, only a third of the 650 MPs were women. In fact, until 1997, female MPs held less than 10% of the MP positions in Parliament. Nancy Astor was the first woman to sit as an MP in Parliament in 1919. The woman who sat as an MP the longest, dubbed the Mother of the House, is Harriet Harman. Ms. Harman has been an MP since 1982 and was reelected most recently in 2019. In this novel, Emma’s grandmother, Gloria Bigelow, was an MP in the 1950s when it was still relatively new for women to be elected to the House of Commons. This role gave her a certain level of notoriety and respect, leading to Leo’s involvement in writing her obituary and his introduction to Emma.