American actress Tallulah Bankhead experienced a resurgence in popular culture after the release of Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood (2020) and Lee Daniels’ The U.S. vs. Billie Holiday (2021). Both Paget Brewster’s portrayal of Tallulah in Hollywood and Natasha Lyonne’s portrayal in…
While the limitations and inequalities of the 1857 Divorce and Marital Causes Act have led to debate over its significance, the case of Brutton v. Brutton illustrates how it empowered ordinary women to escape unhappy and dangerous situations.[i] Certainly, factors…
So, is this a key distinction as we go through the archives of women: we sense their smell, their perfume, or not, as we open folders? And what will it tell us as biographers and historians if we can, or…
In 1940, a high school class took lessons at the New Haven Free Public Library. The library, open since 1887—the year Jennie Jerome’s parents were married, and her father, Yan Phou Lee published When I Was a Boy in China—drew…
Railways and railway infrastructure are in many ways gendered. The way the train and other public and private spaces of the railways are ordered and used reflect not only cultural, societal, and even political norms, values, and practices, but are…
In September 1938, the Austrian potter Lucie Rie arrived in a London soon to be ravaged by German bombings. She was fleeing a country that had become unsafe for Jewish people like herself dramatically fast. Only a short time prior, she…
In Kensal Green cemetery there is a monument with the inscription of ‘TO HER’ written on it and ‘her’ initials (ES) at its base. If you were to come upon it by chance you would wonder who was this person…
In 1720, leading politician Robert Walpole confided in his colleague Earl Cowper that he “did everything” by the Duchess of Kendal and that she was “in effect as much Queen of England as ever any was.”[i] The Duchess was Melusine…
‘If hate were love, if love were hate, It could not make our tale untold…’[1] Few poets have the honour of providing the title for an international bestseller. Even fewer watch the words they wrote grace subsequent film posters and…