By Ursula White The destruction of female religious communities is an often overlooked, yet incredibly significant, result of the English Reformations. As the dissolution of Nunneries, Anchorholds, or Priories left religious women without an equivalent position in the Protestant Clergy, an alternative avenue of expression for the religious women of Early Modern England had to ..read more

By Kate Nicholson Ruth Mallory, wife of Everest climber George Mallory, was described by a mutual ‘friend’ as ‘uneducated’. It hurt.  ‘I think a good many of your friends,’ Ruth told her Cambridge University educated husband George, ‘label one … rather. I mean they think you are funny or uneducated or clever or something and ..read more

Ada Lovelace was born in London on the 10th of December 1815 to a recently married socialite couple. Her father, Lord Byron, who went down in history as one of the greatest Romantic English poets, was a man she never met. Her mother, Lady Byron, was quite the opposite– educated, religious and a rather proper woman. A wealthy heiress, she was also an avid ‘Princess of Parallelograms’, as Byron named her, for her own fascination with mathematics. When Ada was just five weeks old, Byron moved abroad never to return ..read more

Defying both the prevailing milieu and familial expectations, Sophie Germain opted for the pursuit of mathematics, eschewing the conventional roles prescribed for women during her era ..read more

Two minutes and thirty-seven seconds of grit, confidence, and indignation characterise Bikini Kill’s 1993 classic Rebel Girl. But the unpolished vocals and fiery riffs perhaps stand in contrast to the song’s empowering lyrics, with the band proposing a new feminine ideal, that of the ‘Riot Grrrl ..read more

Through her literary works, Chinese novelist Eileen Chang (1920 –1995) brings her readers into a world of matrimony, romance, familial relationships, and the destiny of women residing in patriarchal societies. Unlike works  produced during the May Fourth Movement, Chang's novels refrain from making a singular critique of society dominated by men. Rather, her writings permit women to act as themselves, revealing their own contradictions, repressions, self-confrontations, and even the more sinister facets of their own ugly selves and deformities ..read more

By Cameron Bowman Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko is a text like no other. Probably the first English language novel, its major theme is a subject rarely discussed in the late seventeenth century: the morality of the transatlantic slave trade. When Behn wrote Oroonoko in 1688, the British were still relative newcomers to the transatlantic slave trade ..read more

The success of the recent publication Sofia Coppola’s Archive (2023) reflects powerfully on Coppola’s particular directorial appeal. The art book consists of alluring behind-the-scenes snapshots from the sets of her over two decades-long career as a writer and director. She also adds snippets of the visual inspirations behind her work, a particularly significant inclusion as she frequently credits individual, strong images as her imaginative starting point for a new project. The prominence of the curated image in Coppola's creative practice showcases her suitability to direct films, such as he ..read more

The Iliad and the Odyssey are regarded as foundational works of Western storytelling, relaying the tale of the Trojan War and the attempts of its hero, Odysseus, to return home in its aftermath. Communicating these works in translation, however, often yields different results from each translator. Emily Wilson, an author and Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, is the latest to tackle this challenge, with translations of the Odyssey (2017)  and the Iliad (2023 ..read more

Thatcher maintained throughout her life that Hayek’s famous Road to Serfdom, which she read while an undergraduate at Oxford, had a profound impact on her thinking. Road to Serfdom is Hayek’s account of the fall of Weimar Germany, in which he argues that the introduction of democratic socialism—e.g. a planned economy where the people voted on the plan—would always lead towards totalitarian thinking, including the rise of National Socialism in Germany ..read more