I'm going Yay! Sandi Toksvig

[oursin]

Because when I hear somebody is putting out a book about neglected awesome heroines, my reaction is usually a deep groan and a murmur of 'Rosalind Franklin - Lise Meitner - Ada Lovelace - Mary Anning - ' all those usual suspects whom I have heard only too often described as heroines hidden from history. 'Hidden' in some unusual meaning of that word, I think.

(And talking of deep groans, I observed over the weekend that somebody has produced Yet Another Bio of Sylvia Pankhurst. I already have a group bio of the family which I suspect is extensively based on her history of the suffrage movement plus 2 individual biographies of her. I am not sure there is really anything much more to write...?)

But anyway, Sandi Toksvig has been able to find women who managed to achieve a great deal without so much as fainting, in spite of the strictures of such anti-heroes of anti-suffragism* as Sir Almroth Wright (whose wife, we may add, left him, though whether before or after becoming a suffragist I'm not sure), and they sound fresh and new, at least the ones cited.

Okay, I have heard passing mention of Dame Juliana Berners and Madame Ching, but otherwise, this is not same old same old, yawn.

*This reminds me, discovered on Project Gutenberg this morning, Poetry of the Anti-jacobin Comprising the Celebrated Political and Satirical Poems, of the Rt. Hons. G. Canning, John Hookham Frere, W. Pitt, the Marquis Wellesley, G. Ellis, W. Gifford, the Earl of Carlisle, and Others. O how we chortled...? Famed they may be but not, on the whole, in the realms of political and satirical poetry (possibly Canning, but even then, Of Historical Interest, I suspect, I do not think that we are talking anything that can stand against The Masque of Anarchy).