I suspect that the ONLY woman in science who will NEVER be described as 'hidden from history' and 'written out of the history books' is Marie Curie, right?
But there are honestly quite a number of women in history (in science and other fields)who may not be the top Known Names but have not been Totally Forgotten.
Among whom I would seriously put ( Read more... )

Further to questions of anachronism in work I was lately reading.
(And in minor quibbles, I would not think 'rubber' was a commodity anyone would be making major dosh in during the Regency - see vulcanisation.)
This was absolutely basic backstory setup. Our Hero is a Duke. He is the sole heir to his father, so he is not Unexpected Heir to Dukedom ( Read more... )

Okay, I am not going to judge a historical romance on its linguistic choices, because honestly, I sometimes think Heyer was totally over-egging the pudding and determined to show off her research and by god, she had spent all that time poring over Pierce Egan and she was not going to waste it -
- so I will cut a certain amount of slack over ( Read more... )

Review in the latest Literary Review of that book The Hidden Caee of Ewan Forbes (not alas fully freely available on their website) - I posted a link to an article apropos of this case last month - which actually makes explicit something that was lurking at the back of my mind.
I.e. that Forbes was not the beneficiary of some halcyon and now ( Read more... )

This book sounds fascinating, even if I suspect one might also sometimes wish to have at the subjects (or at least Murdoch) with a codfish: Boo to the Boo-Hurrahs: how four Oxford women transformed philosophy. Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgley took on the male consensus-and revolutionised modern ethics: The four ( Read more... )

Further to the discussion on Saturday apropos of the English Country House Murder Mystery (have there actually ever been any, as opposed to massive amounts of bedhopping, and occasionally A Chap Like That shooting himself in the library?). I think of it as a literary trope which may tell us something about Ye National Psyche, perhaps, but it is not ( Read more... )

I am all for rediscovery of genuinely neglected, or at least 'under-recognised' and interesting writers of the modernist period who didn't perhaps fit neatly into the high modernist canon for reasons to do with issues around class, gender, race, etc: but I'm not altogether happy with the 'an Intellectual Ahead of Her Time' label here, because she ( Read more... )

I am still boggling over this article (it is not a new article, but somebody linked it somewhere and I clicked, and have been going WOT ever since);
The north-south divide is as old as England itself.
I have a codfish who says It's All More Complicated (surprised?).
The idea of the entirety of England south of the Trent being a weird pastoral- ( Read more... )

During a Twitter thread springing off the legitimate contention that prior to mass vaccination programmes there are a lot of tombstones for babies in graveyards - or at least, records of very young children on the family memorials.
So somebody contends that In Ye Old Days children were not loved then because parents did not become attached to ( Read more... )

Dept of: sex in the archives: ‘Corrupting public morals?’ Fitzroy Square and queer desire: We know little about these individuals after this snapshot in time; after all, they were not famous, just working class men who dared to love and live their sexual lives fully.

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Dept of birds and beasts:
I though you weren't supposed to feed bread to the ( Read more... )