Women in History Books

Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England

Alison Weir

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Total reviews: 43 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Isabella arrived in London in 1308, the spirited twelve-year-old daughter of King Philip IV of France. Her marriage to the heir to England’s throne was designed to heal old political wounds between the two countries, and in the years that followed, she would become an important figure, a determined and clever woman whose influence would come to last centuries. But Queen Isabella’s political machinations led generations of historians to malign her, earning her a reputation as a ruthless schemer and an odious nickname, “the She-Wolf of France.”

Now the acclaimed author of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Alison Weir, reexamines the life of Isabella of England, history’s other notorious and charismatic medieval queen. Praised for her fair looks, the newly wed Isabella was denied the attentions of Edward II, a weak, sexually ambiguous monarch with scant taste for his royal duties. As their marriage progressed, Isabella was neglected by her dissolute husband and slighted by his favored male courtiers. Humiliated and deprived of her income, her children, and her liberty, Isabella escaped to France, where she entered into a passionate affair with Edward II’s mortal enemy, Roger Mortimer. Together, Isabella and Mortimer led the only successful invasion of English soil since the Norman Conquest of 1066, deposing Edward and ruling in his stead as co-regents for Isabella’s young son, Edward III. Fate, however, was soon to catch up with Isabella and her lover.

Many mysteries and legends have been woven around Isabella’s story. She was long condemned as an accessory to Edward II’s brutal murder in 1327, but recent research has cast doubt on whether that murder even took place.

Isabella’s reputation, then, rests largely on the prejudices of monkish chroniclers and prudish Victorian scholars. Here Alison Weir gives a startling, groundbreaking new perspective on Isabella, in this first full biography in more than 150 years. In a work of extraordinary original research, Weir effectively strips away centuries of propaganda, legend, and romantic myth, and reveals a truly remarkable woman who had a profound influence upon the age in which she lived and the history of western Europe.

Engaging, vibrant, alive with breathtaking detail and unforgettable characters, Queen Isabella is biographical history at its finest.


From the Hardcover edition.

Catherine the Great

Henri Troyat

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Informative History 4 out of 5 stars.
17 of 17 people found this review helpful.

Prior to reading this book, the only information that I had on Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, was that she was an 18th century Czarina of some repute and that she was essentially a nymphomaniac. While the author disputes my clinical characterization of Catherine's sexual prowess, he certainly does take great pains to point out her long list of conquests, right up until her death at a then advanced age.

This book is very informative and quite enlightening as it relates to the political and social mores of Eastern European and Asian aristocracy during the period of Catherine's reign. The tangled webs of shifting alliances during the roughly 50 years covered by the book are many times fascinating and at times hung by the thread of whether a 16 year old heir to a throne was enchanted at first site by a 13 year old princess. Entire nations hung in the balance.

Especially interesting was the author's repeated juxtaposition between Catherine's espoused liberal "enlightened monarch" ideals and her actual rule over, and disposal of millions of enslaved serfs. Her fascination and financial support of many liberal French and Swiss political reformers and philosophers and then her horror when such philosophies actual came to fruition in the French Revolution.

Ultimately, Catherine was a woman of her times and indisputably proved to be a most able successor to the earlier Peter the Great inasmuch as she made Russia a major player on the European stage and greatly expanded the territory under her control. The personalities involved make for a highly entertaining read.

I've seen some of the comments labeling the prose as dry or tedious and tend to disagree. Certainly, writing style of non-fiction historical biographies differs from that seen in fictionalized accounts. In addition, this is a translation which perhaps hinders certain elements of style that others might prefer. All in all, I was not dissatified with the writing or the content. I recommend this book to any seeking an understanding of Russian or Eastern European history and/or culture during the mid to late 18th century.

The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History

Linda Colley

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this remarkable reconstruction of an eighteenth-century woman's extraordinary and turbulent life, historian Linda Colley not only tells the story of Elizabeth Marsh, one of the most distinctive travelers of her time, but also opens a window onto a radically transforming world.

Marsh was conceived in Jamaica, lived in London, Gibraltar, and Menorca, visited the Cape of Africa and Rio de Janeiro, explored eastern and southern India, and was held captive at the court of the sultan of Morocco. She was involved in land speculation in Florida and in international smuggling, and was caught up in three different slave systems. She was also a part of far larger histories. Marsh's lifetime saw new connections being forged across nations, continents, and oceans by war, empire, trade, navies, slavery, and print, and these developments shaped and distorted her own progress and the lives of those close to her. Colley brilliantly weaves together the personal and the epic in this compelling story of a woman in world history.

Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings

Elizabeth Eger, Lucy Peltz

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

During the 18th century a remarkable group of women formed the Bluestocking Salon, where women and men met to debate contemporary ideas and promote the life of the mind. Together, these cultural innovators helped forge new roles for women as influential thinkers, writers, and artists, and their creative achievements were publicly celebrated.

Richly illustrated with portraits, prints, and personal artifacts, Brilliant Women tells the story of this fascinating group of women. The authors chart the changing fortunes of the female intellectual and explore how a number of bluestocking women, such as artist Angelica Kauffmann, historian Catharine Macaulay, and early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, used portraiture to advance their work and their reputations in a period framed by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

Brilliant Women pays tribute to the friendships and achievements of these bluestocking women, presenting new information on the range of cultural activities in which they were engaged, as well as celebrating their legacy.

Joan of Arc: In her own words

Joan of Arc

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The Maid speaks.... 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

I bought this book several years ago and it is one purchase that I do not regret. Wonderful for grabbing a thought, it often ends up in the pile of my inspirational books. There is nothing like a word from Joan before facing the day. As history, it is an excellent tool from which to derive direct quotations from one of the greatest enigmas of all time. JOAN OF ARC: IN HER OWN WORDS puts the reader in contact with the mind of the saint and the events which she faced so courageously. Her boldness, her femininity, her adandonment and her triumph are all there.

Compelling 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Reading Jehanne's own words is simply an amazing experience. The way the book is written, you can almost hear her speaking with all the passion & fervor she posessed. Reading this book is like being there, back in time, actually watching & hearing all as it happens.

Defective copy 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 7 people found this review helpful.

I read this right after buying it, but it was published in 1996 and the publisher apparently went out of business in 1997. I would like to know whether it is my copy or the entire edition that is defective - the Notes end in mid-word ("Excluded with then are passages merely rou-") on p.147! Then p.148 is blank, and there is no p.149/150, after which the pagination resumes with p.151.

Editorial Review:

The only available source for the exact words of Joan of Arc, compiled from the transcript of her trials and rearranged as an autobiography by Willard Trask.

Sarah Morgan: The Civil War Diary Of A Southern Woman

Charles East

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Born into one of the best families of Baton Rouge, Sarah Morgan was not yet twenty when she began her diary in January 1862, nine months after the start of the Civil War. She was soon to experience a coming-of-age filled with the turmoil and upheaval that devastated the wartime South. She set down the Remarkable events of the war in a record that remains one of the most vivid, evocative portrayals in existence of a time and place that today make up a crucial chapter in our national history.

Sarah Morgan herself emerges as one of the most memorable nineteenth-century women in fiction or nonfiction, a young woman of intelligence and fortitude, as well as of high spirits and passion, who questioned the society into which she was born and the meaning of the war for ordinary families like her own and for the divided nation as a whole.

Now published in its entirety for the first time, Sarah Morgan's classic account brings the Civil War and the Old South to life with all the freshness and immediacy of great literature.

Singled Out: How Two Million British Women Survived Without Men After the First World War

Virginia Nicholson

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

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Almost three-quarters of a million British soldiers lost their lives during the First World War, and many more were incapacitated by their wounds, leaving behind a generation of women who, raised to see marriage as "the crown and joy of woman's life," suddenly discovered that they were left without an escort to life's great feast.
Drawing upon a wealth of moving memoirs, Singled Out tells the inspiring stories of these women: the student weeping for a lost world as the Armistice bells pealed, the socialite who dedicated her life to resurrecting the ancient past after her soldier love was killed, the Bradford mill girl whose campaign to better the lot of the "War spinsters" was to make her a public figure--and many others who, deprived of their traditional roles, reinvented themselves into something better. Tracing their fates, Nicholson shows that these women did indeed harbor secret sadness, and many of them yearned for the comforts forever denied them--physical intimacy, the closeness of a loving relationship, and children. Some just endured, but others challenged the conventions, fought the system, and found fulfillment outside of marriage. From the mill-girl turned activist to the debutante turned archeologist, from the first woman stockbroker to the "business girls" and the Miss Jean Brodies, this book memorializes a generation of young women who were forced, by four of the bloodiest years in human history, to stop depending on men for their income, their identity, and their future happiness. Indeed, Singled Out pays homage to this remarkable generation of women who, changed by war, in turn would change society.

Living My Life (Penguin Classics)

Emma Goldman

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Forget all those New Left memoirs: for readers who want to know what it is to be a revolutionary in America, this is the book to read. At the turn of the 20th century, Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was probably the most hated woman in her adopted country. (She emigrated from Russia at age 17.) It was bad enough that she was an anarchist, accused of complicity in the 1901 assassination of President McKinley. But her vehement espousal of women's rights--including birth control--really enraged upright citizens. Goldman's marvelously militant autobiography gives ample evidence of her gift for bearing a grudge and inability to mince words--she decries fellow leftists at least as often as the bourgeoisie, especially after she is deported to the Soviet Union in 1919 and discovers that the Bolshevik Revolution is not what she hoped for. But Goldman's blazing honesty and unflinching commitment to unpopular causes make her a larger-than-life heroine. She does display the occasional human weakness, including a lengthy romance with a man whose infidelities torment this advocate of free love, but they're less interesting than her heroic challenge to America to live up to its ideals. Whether or not she was literally a bomb thrower remains a matter of debate. For posterity, her words are incendiary enough. --Wendy Smith

The Hidden History of Women's Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West

Gary Macy

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Roman Catholic leadership still refuses to ordain women officially or even to recognize that women are capable of ordination. But is the widely held assumption that women have always been excluded from such roles historically accurate? How might the current debate change if our view of the history of women's ordination were to change?
In The Hidden History of Women's Ordination, Gary Macy offers illuminating and surprising answers to these questions. Macy argues that for the first twelve hundred years of Christianity, women were in fact ordained into various roles in the church. He uncovers references to the ordination of women in papal, episcopal and theological documents of the time, and the rites for these ordinations have survived. The insistence among scholars that women were not ordained, Macy shows, is based on a later definition of ordination, one that would have been unknown in the early Middle Ages. In the early centuries of Christianity, ordination was understood as the process and the ceremony by which one moved to any new ministry in the community. In the early Middle Ages, women served in at least four central ministries: episcopa (woman bishop), presbytera (woman priest), deaconess and abbess. The ordinations of women continued until the Gregorian reforms of the eleventh and twelfth centuries radically altered the definition of ordination. These reforms not only removed women from the ordained ministry, but also attempted to eradicate any memory of women's ordination in the past.
With profound implications for how women are viewed in Christian history, and for current debates about the role of women in the church, The Hidden History of Women's Ordination offers new answers to an old question and overturns a long-held erroneous belief.

Women Travelers: A Century of Trailblazing Adventures 1850-1950

Alexandra Lapierre

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

An award-winning novelist brings to life the stories of the greatest women adventurers in history. From deserts and jungles to mountains and icebergs, they faced unimaginable dangers as they crossed all five continents, often armed with little more than a corset and an umbrella. Spanning a decade, this book mixes triumph and tragedy. The featured women include Fanny Vandegrift, the wife of Robert Louis Stevenson, who ventured all the way from Indiana to Samoa, and Nellie Bly, journalist and social reformer, who went around the world in seventy-two days. The thirty-one women celebrated here hail from fourteen countries and traveled to the farthest reaches of our planet. Twice as brave as their male counterparts, in the face of social convention, these women set off into the unknown. Their bold journeys across the globe had long-lasting effects on the role and status of women in society, and they made important contributions to disciplines as varied as medicine, archeology, and anthropology.