11 Facts About Lilian Wolfe

Lilian Gertrude Woolf, better known as Lilian Wolfe, was an English anarchist, pacifist and feminist.

Lilian Wolfe was for most of her life a member of the Freedom Press publishing collective.

Lilian Wolfe's mother, Lucy Helen Jones, was an actress from Birmingham whom Wolfe would describe as "a very frustrated woman" who left the family when Wolfe was thirteen years of age in order tour the world with an operatic company, while her father, Albert Lewis Woolf was a Liverpudlian jeweller of Jewish descent and of a conservative outlook.

Lilian Wolfe had three brothers and two sisters, and had a comfortable and orthodox middle-class upbringing, educated first by governesses and later for a short period at the Regent Street Polytechnic.

Lilian Wolfe became disillusioned with parliamentary politics as a suffragette, and came to consider the granting of the voting franchise to women a mere "palliative".

Lilian Wolfe was thus attracted to the British anarchist movement and was a founding contributor to the anarchist periodical The Voice of Labour.

Lilian Wolfe was arrested during a subsequent raid of Freedom offices along with her partner Thomas Keell.

In prison however, the forty-year-old Lilian Wolfe discovered that she was pregnant and so paid the fine and secured her release.

Lilian Wolfe lived in Marsh House in London with Nellie Dick, Fred Dunn, and Gaston Marin in 1917, with Keell, their son and W C Owen in Willesden around 1920, and with Keell in the Tolstoyan Whiteway Colony, Gloucestershire from the 1920s until his death in 1938.

When Vernon Richards established the periodical Spain and the World in support of the Spanish anarchists in the civil war, Lilian Wolfe acted as its administrator.

Lilian Wolfe was still politically active well into her old age, selling Peace News in her 90s and acting as manager and administrator of the Freedom Press bookshop until the age of 95.