Blog | Lucienne Boyce

Authors Alison Morton and Helen Hollick in Conversation

Alison Morton, author of the stunning alternative history Roma Nova series, and Helen Hollick, whose historical fiction ranges across the centuries from King Arthur to pirates of the Caribbean, have …

My Month in Books: January 2021

Here are two of the books I’ve enjoyed reading this month. They’re both fantasies, but are very different from one another. Kingdoms of Elfin, Sylvia Townsend Warner (HandheldPress) This collection …

Tea and Suffrage

In 2006 the BBC Antiques Road Show was filmed at the University of Sydney. One of the items their experts valued was a suffragette tea set manufactured in Staffordshire by …

Ignored, patronized and mislabeled: Eliza Haywood and The Female Spectator

I have been reading a selection of articles from The Female Spectator in an edition selected and edited by Mary Priestley and published in 1929. The introduction is by the …

Spotlight On…George Abraham Gibbs (1873–1931)

Tyntesfield, near Wraxall, North Somerset This is the view from our picnic spot when we had a day out at Tyntesfield just outside Bristol recently. Tyntesfield is now …

Inventing the Victorians, Matthew Sweet, Faber & Faber, 2001

There’s an idea behind this book which I sympathise with, and that’s the way people too often accept myths about history for truth. The present uses the past to reflect …

The Women Are Revolting: Charles G Harper and the Ladies of Llangollen

I’ve been reading The Holyhead Road: The Mail Coach Road to Dublin by Charles G Harper. It’s a whopping two-volume work, with each volume being around 300 pages. Harper (1863-1943) …

Judy the Obscure

I’ve just read Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade. I loved this book. It’s about a group of women whose lives and work …

“The suffragette who beat Win C”: Theresa Garnett and the International Alliance of Women

I’ve always been interested in the “after life” of the suffrage campaigners in Britain – what they did after the campaign for the vote – especially since so many histories …

The Father of Virginia Woolf: Women and the Essay

I recently read A C Grayling’s biography The Quarrel of the Age: The Life and Times of William Hazlitt (2000). It’s the fascinating story of a fascinating man, elegantly written …

“Cheap and easy railway traffic”: Suffragettes and the Railways, Part 3: Arson on the Railways

In Part 1 of these three articles exploring the way in which the rail network influenced the suffrage campaign, I looked at how trains were instrumental in facilitating suffrage campaigns, …

“Cheap and easy railway traffic”: Suffragettes and the Railways, Part 2: The Battle to Free Mrs Pankhurst

In Part 1 of these three articles about how the rail network influenced the suffrage campaign, I looked at how trains were instrumental in facilitating suffrage campaigns, including militant activism, …