Monday 2 March 2009

bluestocking heroines

The bluestocking's heroines may include:
  • Flora Poste - The Higher Common Sense - need we say more?
  • Stella Gibbons, wit, author, genius
  • Granny Weatherwax - for sheer attitude (fictional witch)
  • Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas - proper bluestocking names
  • Leonora Carrington - fabulous paintings
  • Radclyffe Hall - rather too keen to be a chap, but splendid taste in hats
  • Celia Fiennes - lady explorer
  • The Pankhursts, and all the Suffragettes
  • Mary Wollstonecraft - early feminist
  • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - first SF writer
  • Augusta Ada Byron - lady genius and programmer of the Babbage Difference Engine
  • Amelia Earheart - pilot
  • Josephine Baker - artiste
  • Octavia Hill - co-founder of the National Trust
  • Olive Hawthorn - fictional witch in Doctor Who
  • Gwen Raverat - artist
  • Annie Horniman - occultist
  • Florence Farr - actress & occultist
  • Female occultists generally
  • The Pre-Raphaelite women artists
  • Hypatia of Alexandria - philosopher
  • Marie Curie - scientist
  • Women scientists generally
  • Artemisia Gentileschi - Renaissance artist
  • Dorothy Parker - wit and raconteuse
  • Gertrude von Petzold - first woman to be ordained (Unitarian)
  • Hildegard of Bingen - female mystic & artist
  • Mrs Seacole - female doctor in the Crimea

5 comments:

  1. More heroines and possibly pin-ups(!) of the Bluestocking universe:

    Virginia Woolfe
    Vita Sackville West
    Jeanette Winterson
    Margaret Atwood
    A.S. Byatt
    Simone de Beauvoir
    Elizabeth Anscombe: 1919-2001
    Dame Mary Warnock

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  2. and of course, Virginia Woolf... ;-)

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  3. Amen to Vita Sackville West, Jeanette Winterson, A.S. Byatt, and Simone de Beauvoir.

    You missed out Angela Carter (and so did I!) Also Ursula Le Guin and Ursula Fanthorpe.

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  4. Gail Trimble!

    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article5818247.ece

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  5. Definitely! She should be a heroine AND a pinup!

    "the 'bluestocking' – a clever woman unbothered by looks or fashion sense. " And why should she be? She has more interesting things to think about.

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