READERS GUIDE

Introduction

1. How do you interpret the title of the novel?
 
2. Did you find your sympathies with the characters shifting with the moves between the different narrators?
 
3. Why do you think the author has chosen to tell the story from three different points of view?
 
4. Although the book is set in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, it is easy to identify with the characters. How has the author achieved this?
 
5. The author has said that she was fascinated by the fact that “women were out there beating one another up on stage whilst Jane Austen was sipping tea.” Has The Fair Fight changed your ideas about what life must have been like in Georgian times?
 
6. “My days,” I said, “who’d want to be a lady?”

“Indeed, no one should,” she said. “It is a hateful thing to be. We are bound in every direction.”

“What’d you rather be, a gent?”

What do you think the novel is trying to say about female emancipation?
 
7. What do you consider to be the most significant fight of the novel?
 
8. Ruth, Charlotte, and George are all oppressed in some way. Who do you think has the greatest struggle?
 
9. I had never before been so utterly without chaperone. Oh, I had been out with only a servant, but Henry and Mrs Webber were not servants, they were conspirators. I thought, I am out at dusk, in unsavoury company, and felt the joy of it bubble in my throat. 

Why do you think Ruth and Charlotte are so drawn to each other?
 
10. All of the characters are striving for personal freedom. How many of them are ultimately successful?