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... )

It's Thanksgiving, for my friends in the USA*, and it's International Men's Day.
And it occured to me that one can be very thankful for IMD, if only because it provides a useful and necessary riposte every 8th March to the blokes who come out from the woodwork to moan gripe and whinge Y No International MENZ Day? ('19 November, bozo'.)
It is ( ( Read more... )

200 years ago, the birth of Mary Ann Evans, in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, better known to posterity as George Eliot.
A nice tribute in the leaders of today's Guardian.
The final paragraph from Middlemarch: Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the ( Read more... )

And admittedly, I do not have a lot of time for Robert Southey on account of his patronising letter to Charlotte Bronte, and I think it was a bit plausible-deniability evasive when you were writing in the 1790s to set your poem nearly a century earlier, but I will cut him a bit of slack for being expelled from Westminster School for rebelling ( Read more... )

How amateur sleuths finally tracked down the burial place of William Blake.
And here is an eeeuw, or at least, tin-eared, bit of reporting: He is one of the nation’s most celebrated creatives. (Article also describes these dedicated fans 'pouring' through archives - aaaargh!)
Images of the gravestone here.
I do have a little cynical wonder about ( Read more... )

Born on this day, 1757.
How to celebrate?
The weather is perhaps not quite what one would wish for playing Adam and Eve in the garden, as is reputed he did with his wife.
We could wander through the chartered streets, to where the chartered Thames doth flow, and see in every face we meet, marks of weakness, marks of woe.
We could visit Peckham Rye, ( Read more... )

Will it be so again
That the brave, the gifted are lost from view,
And empty, scheming men
Are left in peace their lunatic age to renew?
Will it be so again?

Must it be always so
That the best are chosen to fall and sleep
Like seeds, and we too slow
In claiming the earth they quicken, and the old usurpers reap
What they could not sow?

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To George Henry Lewes, born 18 April 1817.
Best known, I guess, for being a rare male instance of supportive helpmeet to a woman (to Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot).
Even to the extent that it's possible that his own achievements get overlooked because of the shadow he was in. We also note that he pursued what has sometimes been a ( Read more... )

Hello, new DW people!
Most of you seem to be people I know from That Other Place, but in case you are not, the introductory post is here.
In order to provide a little more content, I might add that I discovered that the poet Edward Thomas was killed at Battle of Arras, Easter Monday 1917. Apart from a handful of poems within his relatively small ( Read more... )