This article is more than 9 months old

This article is more than 9 months old

She loved parties, dogs and, as Queen Victoria’s goddaughter who lived in a grace and favour royal apartment, she was fabulously well connected.

But Princess Sophia Duleep Singh was also a suffragette and therefore marked down as a danger to the state.

Surveillance files compiled on Duleep Singh will go on display for the first time at the British Library next year as part of its spring show exploring the history of the fight for women’s rights.

The library announced details of a show that will include about 180 objects, many going on display for the first time, including poems Sylvia Pankhurst wrote on rough prison toilet paper during her second spell in jail. There will also be banners loaned by Southall Black Sisters.

Polly Russell, the curator, said it was a huge and timely subject. “We are trying to tell a really big story and to connect this current moment of activism to the history,” she said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An extract from Duleep Singh’s diary that will be on display at the British Library. Photograph: British Library board

Duleep Singh, the daughter of an exiled Indian maharaja, lived in a royal apartment at Hampton Court Palace and went from enjoying debutante balls and dog breeding to more politically important pursuits as an active member of the Women’s Tax Resistance League and the Women’s Social and Political Union.

This made her a nuisance and she was closely monitored by the police. The library holds surveillance files for Duleep Singh stretching from 1902 to 1920, some marked “political and secret department”.

One note from April 1913 records a telephone call to the office of Lord Crewe, the then secretary of state for India, by a prominent politician asking if anything could be done to “stop her”.

A civil servant writes that there is no financial hold over Duleep Singh. “It is for the king to say whether her conduct is such as should call for her eviction from the lodging she now enjoys in Hampton Court by his majesty’s favour,” they write.

Russell said the files gave “a sense of just how unsettled people were … by her but also by suffrage as a whole. It was seen as a real problem for the state.”

One of the most prominent suffragettes was Sylvia Pankhurst, who served sentences in Holloway prison in 1913 and 1921.

The exhibition will show examples of poems Pankhurst wrote on toilet paper during her second spell in jail, for sedition. “It speaks to this kind of insistence to be heard, even when you are in prison,” said Russell. “It has a slightly [The] Handmaid’s Tale feel to it.”

Curators debated whether to hold the exhibition in 2018 to mark the 100th anniversary of the Representation of the People Act but decided there were already many events taking place that year.

Russell said: “The conversation did not end in 2018 … We have not yet entered a gender utopia.”

Russell said she was particularly pleased Southall Black Sisters, the campaign group that celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, was lending banners to the show.

“Honestly, I could have done the whole exhibition just on their banners,” she said. “They are such an important organisation, campaigning in a really intersectional way before that word even existed.”

Russell said she wanted the exhibition to appeal to all generations and, while she prepared the show, a constant consideration was how she could excite her 15-year-old daughter.

Russell recalled being 13 and receiving a book from her mother called Girls are Powerful.

“I was really embarrassed to be seen with it because, at the time, you wouldn’t want to say you were a feminist, but that book was totemic for me … it shifted something in the way I saw the world,” she said. “I dream to hope that some people will have a moment like that at this exhibition.”