Blog | Lucienne Boyce

My Month in Books: December 2021

This month I’ve chosen two novels which both look at ideas about family, marriage and masculinity, though in very different settings. The pairing is accidental: when I started reading them …

My Month in Books: November 2021

This month I’m looking at two novels, one set in a very ordinary world about “a very ordinary” life, and the other in a fantasy world about far-from-ordinary people. Both …

My Month in Books: October 2021

Both of the books I’ve selected this month look at different societies – one imagined in the future, the other real and in the past. For fiction there’s Octavia Butler’s …

Spotlight on…Mabel Harriette Cross, Suffragist

Usually referred to as Mrs W C H Cross, she was born Mabel Harriette Duncan in Bristol in 1872. Her mother was Adelaide, and her father, Edward Duncan, was a …

My Month in Books: September 2021

This month it’s vampires and classicists – two groups I don’t usually mix with! – with Nicole Jarvis’s exciting historical fantasy The Lights of Prague, and Mary Beard’s autobiographical enquiry, …

Being a Secretary

One of the subjects I’m interested in is the history of women office workers, and how it came about that women to this day dominate secretarial and clerical jobs. Many …

My Month in Books: August 2021

The books I enjoyed most this month were Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal by Sarah Lefanu, which shares insights into the process of writing a biography, and Monica Dickens’s …

‘Those wanton imbecile women’: the Gatty Laboratory and the Militant Suffragettes

This article is based on research and conversations with Edward Warington Shann’s daughter, Hebe Welbourn. Quotations by Edward Warington Shann are from his letter to his mother dated 22 June …

My Month in Books July 2021

My reading highlights this month are a look back at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in Greenham Common:Women at the Wire, and fantastic adventures in thirteenth-century China in Jin Yong’s …

No Surrender: Constance Maud and the Suffragette Novel

Constance Maud’s 1911 suffragette novel No Surrender tells the story of a group of suffragettes, particularly Jenny Clegg, Lancashire mill girl, and aristocratic Mary O’Neill. It’s unashamedly a propaganda novel, …

My Month in Books June 2021

My selected books for June took me from the beauty and culture of the Morris home at Kelmscott House, London in May Morris: Arts and Crafts Designer, Anna Mason et …

Pugs, Roos and Amazonians: Some Lesser Known Boxing Matches of the Eighteenth Century

In eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain, bare-knuckle boxing was a popular sport which drew followers from across the social spectrum, from the Prince of Wales and the aristocracy down. Charles …