Francesca Peacock

Where are the women writers? Has their work been lost to history? And were they any good? Francesca Peacock takes on these questions in Authoress. 

As recently as 2022, only 2.5 per cent of writers on the core syllabus of the Oxford Master’s degree in English from 1700 to 1830 were women. Authoress answers with an alternative story of English literature. It shows how women have always written: with quills, needles and thread, at kitchen tables and in jail, in convents, parlours, attics and ships at sea.

Across ten centuries, Peacock takes us from cells where medieval anchoresses penned mystic visions to country houses where the exiled Mary, Queen of Scots wove tapestries of women’s lives to adorn the walls; and from kitchens where Tudor mothers compiled recipe books to the grubby streets of eighteenth-century London, where Delarivier Manley fictionalised the scandals of the day. In doing so, she argues that female writers have always been around us – you simply have to look a little closer. 

Francesca Peacock is a writer and critic. Her first book, Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish, was a Spectator and History Today Book of the Year. She is an arts contributor for the Telegraph and a books essayist for Prospect. Her broadcast appearances include BBC Radio 4 Today and Front Row, and BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking. She is a Clarendon Scholar at the University of Oxford.