Historical Heroines

Book excerpt: From Mata Hari and Pocahontas to Lucrezia Borgia and Hedy Lamarr—fascinating portraits of history’s most unforgettable, and some unjustly forgotten, women. Cleopatra. Audrey Hepburn. Sappho. Calamity Jane. Marie Antoinette. Lilith. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Dame Emma Hamilton. Mary Shelley. Mary Frith. Some are celebrated in folklore legend; some are remembered only as movie stars; many will be familiar in their native countries; while others are, for the most part, unjustly unknown. Not anymore. Let this rewarding anthology set the record straight on: World War I heroine and nurse Edith Cavell; turn of the century Iñupiat explorer Ada Blackjack; eighteenth-century abolitionist, slave, and women’s rights pioneer Soujourner Truth; Gorgo, 480 BC Queen of Sparta; Agent 355, the American Revolution’s most mysterious spy; nineteenth-century socialite and archaeologist Lady Hester Stanhope; eighteenth-century Irish physician Margaret Bulky who plied her trade by passing as a man for fifty years; and many, many more adventurers, leaders, and freedom fighters—each and every one, a groundbreaker whose name deserves a place in history.