She broke with Christabel Pankhurst and the WSPU in 1914 over their support for the war, and remained until the end of her life an active peace and women's equality campaigner.

[2][3] During this period, she was frequently arrested and imprisoned for acts linked to the suffragette campaign, including refusing to buy a dog license.

[4] Convicted for her part in a window-smashing campaign in the West End of London, between March and July 1912 Evans was held in the Feeble-Minded Inebriate bloc of Aylesbury Prison.

Priestley"), Dr Elizabeth Bell (Ireland's first qualified woman gynaecologist), both of whom were unionist, and Winifred Carney (James Connolly's secretary in the Belfast branch of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union).

In court, five days later, the pair created uproar when they demanded to know why the Ulster Unionist James Craig who was arming the Volunteers with German guns was not appearing on the same charges.

Remanded in custody, the women on hunger strike were released under the Cat and Mouse Act but then promptly re-arrested after they drove around Belfast city centre and passed the courthouse in an opened-top car festooned it with suffragette flags.

She wrote to fellow militant Kate Evans, "I am getting some mental and spiritual peace, though my body is suffering – I find I am getting ill much sooner now I am not taking water either… The cells here are darker than any I have seen".

[14][15] In May Metge had been part of the large group of women who charged at King George V outside Buckingham Palace, and during Evans's trail had herself been arrested for throwing stones at the court windows.

Evans also became active with an earlier breakaway from the WSPU, the Women's Freedom League, in 1917 helping form a branch in Newcastle upon Tyne with Ada Broughton and Emily Davison.

Evans had maintained simultaneous long-term relationships with Sybil Morrison and Emil Davies, a married Labour Party London County councillor.

At the time of her death in August 1944 her daughter Lyndal (named after the heroine in Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm) was a member of the executive committee of the Six Point Group.