Apart from two well-known women, Æthelflæd and Elfrida (Ælfthryth), there’s a lack of information in books about the royal women of 10th-century England, says MJ Porter. So MJ decided to write a book about them. Here are some of the women it covers, including the impressive Eadgifu. In recent years, I’ve set about fictionalising the […]
Bess Throckmorton and the Gunpowder Plotters’ wives
Bess Throckmorton, Walter Raleigh’s wife, was a formidable character who survived disgrace under Elizabeth I and her husband’s execution under James VI and I. Intrigued by her, Alexandra Walsh found that Bess’s connections to the wives of most of the Gunpowder Plotters would give Bess a central role in her novel, The Secrets of Cresswell […]
Rewriting Creation: the Fall of Woman
Nikki Marmery explores the ancient stories that made her ask: where is the mother in the creation myth? This question inspired her to write Lilith, an allegory of the demise of female divinity and equality in prehistory – in other words, the Fall of Woman. The legend of Lilith, Adam’s first wife in the Garden […]
Businesswomen through the ages
Gill Paul writes about some of the businesswomen who defied convention and restrictive laws to become successful entrepreneurs through the ages, including the wealthiest woman in early New York; the painter Hogarth’s sisters; the inventor of a baby-making vegetable compound; the African-American who became the first self-made female millionaire in the US; and the rivals […]
Vulcana, the strongwoman history forgot
Kate Williams, known as Vulcana, was a world-famous strongwoman in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but she has slipped out of history since then. When Rebecca F John came across her she knew she had to tell Vulcana’s extraordinary story. Here she does just that, and wonders why Vulcana was forgotten. Was she […]
Six godmothers of archaeology
Alexandra Walsh pays tribute to six pioneering women who gained respect in the male domain of archaeology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and who inspired her latest novel. They were the ‘godmothers of archaeology’ who worked in Crete, Egypt, Iran, Iraq and Turkey at sites such as Knossos, Babylon and Troy. The […]
From slave to queen: an extraordinary medieval woman
Among the powerful medieval women whose stories have — against all odds — survived the years, Balthild, the seventh-century Neustrian queen, is one of the most extraordinary. A slave who became a queen and, later, a saint, she was an unexpected source of inspiration for Matthew Harffy’s latest Bernician Chronicles story, Forest of Foes. The […]
The women of the Gunpowder Plot
Think of the Gunpowder Plot and you think of the men involved. Yet, as Nicola Cornick explains, that’s a mistakenly narrow view; we need to take into account the role and influence of the women in the family networks which bound the plotters together just as much as their Catholic faith did. The Gunpowder Plot […]