Isabel Giberne Sieveking

Sieveking was born in 1857 in Epsom, Surrey, and was raised as a devout Catholic.^[2] She was the youngest of the four children born to George Sieveking and Maria Sieveking Giberne.^[3] Her first cousin was the poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins.^[4][5]

When she was 33 years old, Sieveking married 25 year old timber-merchant Edward Gustavus Sieveking on 25 April 1891.^[3] She referred to him as "dear Ted".^[1] They lived in Harrow and Hastings.^[6]

They had four children:^[6]

• Valentine Edgar Sieveking (1892–1918)^[7]
• Geoffrey Edward Sieveking (1893–1979)

• Lancelot Giberne Sieveking (1896–1972)^[8][9]
• Elinor Beatrice Sieveking (1898–1989)

Sieveking's public views on marriage were radical and she wrote to the Hastings and St. Leonard's Observer on 3 December 1910 that "The highest ideal was not marriage. It could not be when sex was purely temporal."^[10] In the 12 July 1913 issue of the suffragette magazine The Awakener, Sieveking argued that marriage cannot satisfy women's desires for close companionship in an article titled "The Celibate Englishwoman."^[11]

Sieveking was a suffragette and member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). She participated in the 1911 census boycott, with the enumerator writing on her return: "Husband had left the town when I called and the wife, who is a suffragette, refused to sign as correct".^[6] She also wrote to local newspapers and got caught up in the 1913 Hastings riots when antisuffragists attacked a group of suffrage campaigners on the seafront.^[3]

When Levetleigh House in St. Leonards-on-Sea was burned down by suffragettes, Sieveking was not involved, but did support the act.^[12]

She was the secretary of the local branch of the Parents' National Educational Union.^{[citation needed]}