Pens, pilgrims and progress:

A look at seven fascinating lives spanning fourteen centuries. Each is a personal heroine.  Each made a mark on the world.  Each may be said to have suffered from the standard view of history as written about kings, queens and… men.  The sequence begins with the first woman to write travel prose, a fourth century pilgrim to the Holy Land; it spans scientists, reformers and women of letters; it ends with the woman who dared to confront Napoleon and a poet who drafted the first women’s right’s legislation in Britain.  Several of these women are celebrated in my new book, Unquiet Women (2018).