Sometimes the inspiration for a novel is very close to home, very personal. It was the true story of her mother and aunt, both biologists and PhDs, both denied the careers they might have had, that led Rachel Hore to the idea for The Secrets of Dragonfly Lodge. Here she writes about the barriers that […]
Women on the warpath in WWI
Louise Morrish looks at two courageous women who defied the authorities and went on the warpath during the First World War: one, literally, as a soldier, and one as a doctor. Louisa Garrett Anderson and Dorothy Lawrence inspired her new book, Women of War. In 1914, a surgeon and a soldier went to war — […]
Joanna Plantagenet, the lionhearted woman
Joanna Plantagenet, Queen of Sicily, later Countess of Toulouse, was every bit as lionhearted as her more famous brother Richard I. As her biographer, Catherine Hanley, says, she “led an extraordinary life full of adventure and danger”, the more so because she was a woman. Joanna’s eventful life also illustrates many of the major issues […]
Feisty Victorian women
Were Victorian women feisty? As Jem Poster says, they wouldn’t have recognised the word, but they’d have known the attitude. Some were feisty enough to become detectives – like Eliza Mace, the fictional protagonist of his new book. Reviewers of our co-written historical detective mystery, Eliza Mace, have repeatedly described the book’s titular heroine as […]
Japan’s court ladies, warrior women and courtesans
Lesley Downer, the author of The Shortest History of Japan, looks at different roles taken by women during that country’s long history: court ladies, warrior women and courtesans. She shows how, through the ages, they have found ways to use their skills to make their voices heard. Court ladies More than a thousand years ago, […]
Female sexuality in historical fiction
Lesley McDowell wanted to show all the consequences of women’s sexuality in her novel, Clairmont — the tragic and the happy. There was plenty of both in the Shelley-Godwin-Byron circle that shaped her protagonist Claire Clairmont’s life. And female sexual desire needs to be reflected in historical fiction, Lesley says. In a letter to her […]
The window-smashing suffragettes of 1912
Jennifer Godfrey writes about some of the suffragettes involved in the window smashing campaign in 1912, and the careful planning that went into their latest mission. In June and July 1912, 112 years ago, suffragette prisoners were being released from prison having served time for window smashing. Some had completed their full sentence but others […]
Felo de Se: the gruesome punishment that led to me writing The Low Road
Katharine Quarmby’s investigation into the gruesome burial of a suicide victim — for felo de se — with links to her home town inspired her first novel, The Low Road. For Women’s History Month, she explains why this punishment fell disproportionately onto poor women, and what made her want to tell this story. On a […]