REVIEW
INTERNATIONAL #1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR
KATE MOSSE
ANNOUNCES FIRST EVER ONE-WOMAN SHOW FOR 2023
WARRIOR QUEENS & QUIET REVOLUTIONARIES
The Show
Thursday 30 March
Westcliff on Sea
Palace Theatre
INTERNATIONAL #1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR
KATE MOSSE
ANNOUNCES FIRST EVER ONE-WOMAN SHOW FOR 2023
WARRIOR QUEENS & QUIET REVOLUTIONARIES
The Show
Thursday 30 March
Westcliff on Sea
Palace Theatre
Kate Mosse, the well- known historical fiction writer, appeared at the Palace Theatre, Westcliff, as part of a one-woman tour. Kate discussed how men have airbrushed women out of history, and ties in with her book, Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World.
Instead of seeing a lone woman standing at her lectern, the audience had an interactive, barnstorming performance. Kate strode around the stage in her Herman Munster shoes and there was music, videos and projection of photos. The stage set with objects - from a football to a model of a 19th Century sheep - these she occasionally picked up to demonstrate her story, as touching an object brings back the sense of the history behind it.
The evening began with a crash of thunder, and spooky scenes in graveyards reminiscent of Great Expectations, which is exactly what the audience had. Kate introduced us to her Great Aunt Lily Watson, who in the nineteenth century was a famous novelist and writer. She wrote fourteen novels and many articles, yet no one has heard of her. She doesn’t feature in any archives or published biographies and, it was this thought that set Kate on the path of wondering about other forgotten women of achievement.
Through the evening, Kate talked about women in medicine, science, civil rights, and the resistance in WW2. She also interspersed Lily’s story, whose family lived with Haemophilia, that was worthy of a book on its own.
She interacted with the audience in a humorous way, asking for responses, and occasionally flinging out ‘did you know?’ questions, such as, ‘there are more statues to dogs in Edinburgh than there are to women.’ That only 14% of the Blue National Heritage plaques are dedicated to women.
Kate began with the 23rd century BCE, Enheduanna, the first named author in history. Her name found on ancient tiles turned up in excavations, and went through to the present day. How today, the famous Afghan 10th Century, poetess Rabia Balkhi is airbrushed out of history, and women in that country are not permitted education. ‘If women cannot write, they are denied the opportunity to tell their own stories in their own voices, and half of our human story is lost.’
Most of the women mentioned were unfamiliar, Josephine Garis Cochrane, the dishwasher inventor, Isabella Bird a famous travel correspondent, Etta Lemon and Eliza Phillips, whose work protecting birds from being slaughtered for their feathers, led to the forming of the RSPB. In science, there was what's known as the ‘Matilda effect’, after a tract by abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage. It means that work of female scientists is credited to male colleagues, who were often their assistants.
I had heard of the pirate Anne Bonney, and Caroline Norton whose work changed the law that gained women the rights in marriage to their own children and money. Also, that in the 19th century, women in England could go to university, but not obtain degrees.
The evening would not be complete without Florence Nightingale. Although she hasn’t been airbrushed out of history, all the other women that were part of the changes in nursing and medicine have been. However, if women become famous, a myth is created about them to fit the ideal for men. Florence was never just the gentle woman who walked around the hospital with a lamp. She was a feisty, protesting woman, who had strong racist views and was an expert in statistics, but that doesn’t fit the myth.
However, Mary Seacole, the Jamaican woman who provided nursing in the Crimea at the same time as Florence has been rehabilitated. She now has a statue outside St Thomas Hospital.
Rosa Parks was not the first woman to spark off the civil rights in the USA. It was Pauli Murray in the forties, who also wouldn’t give up her seat in a whites only section. However, she was what today would be called non-binary. and that didn’t fit the ideal.
History is never taught in a linear way and there have been periods in the past where women received the respect and dedication that they deserved. However, those periods go backwards and forwards. The protest movement was never about women being better, but always about being equal to men.
Kate covers a world of resistance, writers, scientists, queens that have been overlooked and forgotten and was a very entertaining evening. However, her book covers many more stories.
As someone once said, ‘History is the book of myth where women disappear.’
Review- Jacquee Storozynski-Toll
Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World by Kate Mosse is published by Mantle (£20), plus audio and ebook
The tour continues April 2023 March 31 Fri - Portsmouth New Theatre Royal
Apr 02 Sun – Eastbourne, Devonshire Park TheatreApr 04 Tue Bury St Edmunds, The Apex
Apr 05 Wed – Northampton, Derngate Theatre
Apr 06 Thu – Crewe, Lyceum Theatre
Instead of seeing a lone woman standing at her lectern, the audience had an interactive, barnstorming performance. Kate strode around the stage in her Herman Munster shoes and there was music, videos and projection of photos. The stage set with objects - from a football to a model of a 19th Century sheep - these she occasionally picked up to demonstrate her story, as touching an object brings back the sense of the history behind it.
The evening began with a crash of thunder, and spooky scenes in graveyards reminiscent of Great Expectations, which is exactly what the audience had. Kate introduced us to her Great Aunt Lily Watson, who in the nineteenth century was a famous novelist and writer. She wrote fourteen novels and many articles, yet no one has heard of her. She doesn’t feature in any archives or published biographies and, it was this thought that set Kate on the path of wondering about other forgotten women of achievement.
Through the evening, Kate talked about women in medicine, science, civil rights, and the resistance in WW2. She also interspersed Lily’s story, whose family lived with Haemophilia, that was worthy of a book on its own.
She interacted with the audience in a humorous way, asking for responses, and occasionally flinging out ‘did you know?’ questions, such as, ‘there are more statues to dogs in Edinburgh than there are to women.’ That only 14% of the Blue National Heritage plaques are dedicated to women.
Kate began with the 23rd century BCE, Enheduanna, the first named author in history. Her name found on ancient tiles turned up in excavations, and went through to the present day. How today, the famous Afghan 10th Century, poetess Rabia Balkhi is airbrushed out of history, and women in that country are not permitted education. ‘If women cannot write, they are denied the opportunity to tell their own stories in their own voices, and half of our human story is lost.’
Most of the women mentioned were unfamiliar, Josephine Garis Cochrane, the dishwasher inventor, Isabella Bird a famous travel correspondent, Etta Lemon and Eliza Phillips, whose work protecting birds from being slaughtered for their feathers, led to the forming of the RSPB. In science, there was what's known as the ‘Matilda effect’, after a tract by abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage. It means that work of female scientists is credited to male colleagues, who were often their assistants.
I had heard of the pirate Anne Bonney, and Caroline Norton whose work changed the law that gained women the rights in marriage to their own children and money. Also, that in the 19th century, women in England could go to university, but not obtain degrees.
The evening would not be complete without Florence Nightingale. Although she hasn’t been airbrushed out of history, all the other women that were part of the changes in nursing and medicine have been. However, if women become famous, a myth is created about them to fit the ideal for men. Florence was never just the gentle woman who walked around the hospital with a lamp. She was a feisty, protesting woman, who had strong racist views and was an expert in statistics, but that doesn’t fit the myth.
However, Mary Seacole, the Jamaican woman who provided nursing in the Crimea at the same time as Florence has been rehabilitated. She now has a statue outside St Thomas Hospital.
Rosa Parks was not the first woman to spark off the civil rights in the USA. It was Pauli Murray in the forties, who also wouldn’t give up her seat in a whites only section. However, she was what today would be called non-binary. and that didn’t fit the ideal.
History is never taught in a linear way and there have been periods in the past where women received the respect and dedication that they deserved. However, those periods go backwards and forwards. The protest movement was never about women being better, but always about being equal to men.
Kate covers a world of resistance, writers, scientists, queens that have been overlooked and forgotten and was a very entertaining evening. However, her book covers many more stories.
As someone once said, ‘History is the book of myth where women disappear.’
Review- Jacquee Storozynski-Toll
Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World by Kate Mosse is published by Mantle (£20), plus audio and ebook
The tour continues April 2023 March 31 Fri - Portsmouth New Theatre Royal
Apr 02 Sun – Eastbourne, Devonshire Park TheatreApr 04 Tue Bury St Edmunds, The Apex
Apr 05 Wed – Northampton, Derngate Theatre
Apr 06 Thu – Crewe, Lyceum Theatre
‘Think back to your classroom, to the roll call of inventors and politicians, military leaders and scientists, philosophers and composers, thinkers and mystics and ask yourself this question. Where are the women?’ – Kate Mosse
Kate Mosse OBE, the international #1 multi-million selling author, exchanges her pen for the stage and turns performer in her first ever one woman show, touring the UK now. Inspired by Kate’s best-selling book Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World, this is a fabulous night-out in the theatre that has been delighting audiences around the country.
A fabulous evening of entertainment – music, images and storytelling - the show will see Kate celebrate the lives of extraordinary, brilliant, trail-blazing and heroic women from throughout history whose names deserve to be better known. It’s part detective story into her own, sometimes heart-breaking, family history - as she’ll share how she tracked down her own long-forgotten relative, Lily Watson, in whose literary shadow she is walking – part fanfare to the incredible women in whose footsteps we all walk, and part love letter about how history is made and who gets to make it.
In each show, Kate will shine a spotlight on fascinating and often overlooked, or ignored, facts about the women who made history, from every corner of the world and in every period of time.
DID YOU KNOW
Over the course of the evening, Kate will feature a joyous and diverse cast of characters, some unknown and some legendary: from the world’s first named author, Enheduanna, to the world’s bestselling author, Agatha Christie; from Joan of Arc to the heroine of the Greek War of Independence, Laskarina Bouboulina; from freedom riders Rosa Parks and Pauli Murray to Victorian explorer Isabella Bird; from Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole to Elizabeth Garrett Anderson to the Edinburgh Seven; from educational pioneer Maria Montessori to the barn-storming suffragette and composer Ethel Smyth; from comet hunter Caroline Herschel to the one and only Marie Curie; from the 13th century Mongolian princess, Khutulan, to Beatrix Potter.
Women of faith and conviction, women of conservation and law, the warrior queens and quiet revolutionaries. Each night the audience will meet the ‘mothers of invention’ and ‘pirate queens’; unsung pioneers of medicine and women’s rights, those who dazzled on the screen, the stage and in the sports stadium; those fought for what they believed and those who reached for the stars, and the female scientists whose work was overlooked or misattributed.
The Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries, The Show , will surprise, amaze, challenge and perhaps even encourage some in the audience to undertake a little family history of their own as we travel the world and through time: 23rd century Sumeria BCE to 19th century Japan, Revolutionary France to Germany in the 1940s, South Africa and New Zealand, Russia to China, Antarctica to South America, 15th century Ireland to 21st century Britain. From Manchester to Bristol, London to Edinburgh, Keswick to Preston, Cardiff to Penzance, come and spend an evening in the company of the amazing women who, in one way of another, also made our world.
‘My hope is that Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries will inspire as I have been inspired. It’s a love letter to history and about how, without knowing where we come from – truthfully and entirely - we cannot know who we are.’ Kate Mosse
Ticket information via:
www.katemosse.co.uk/events
https://www.facebook.com/KateMosseAuthor
https://twitter.com/katemosse
Kate Mosse OBE, the international #1 multi-million selling author, exchanges her pen for the stage and turns performer in her first ever one woman show, touring the UK now. Inspired by Kate’s best-selling book Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World, this is a fabulous night-out in the theatre that has been delighting audiences around the country.
A fabulous evening of entertainment – music, images and storytelling - the show will see Kate celebrate the lives of extraordinary, brilliant, trail-blazing and heroic women from throughout history whose names deserve to be better known. It’s part detective story into her own, sometimes heart-breaking, family history - as she’ll share how she tracked down her own long-forgotten relative, Lily Watson, in whose literary shadow she is walking – part fanfare to the incredible women in whose footsteps we all walk, and part love letter about how history is made and who gets to make it.
In each show, Kate will shine a spotlight on fascinating and often overlooked, or ignored, facts about the women who made history, from every corner of the world and in every period of time.
DID YOU KNOW
- that when the Lionesses played to a record crowd at the Euros at Wembley in July 2022, they were walking in the footsteps of the legendary Merseyside footballer, Lily Parr, who scored nearly one thousand goals in a career lasting from 1919 to 1952 before hanging up her boots?
- that scientist and inventor Eunice Newton Foote was the first to understand the phenomenon of global warming, though her work was accredited to the male scientists who came after her?
- that the first dishwasher was invented by an American woman – Josephine Cochrane – in Chicago and patented in 1893, presumably after a particularly large dinner party when no one offered to do the washing up!
- that Keira Knightley’s character in The Pirates of the Caribbean, was inspired by notorious ‘she-captain’ female pirates of the 18th century, Anne Bonny and Mary Read?
Over the course of the evening, Kate will feature a joyous and diverse cast of characters, some unknown and some legendary: from the world’s first named author, Enheduanna, to the world’s bestselling author, Agatha Christie; from Joan of Arc to the heroine of the Greek War of Independence, Laskarina Bouboulina; from freedom riders Rosa Parks and Pauli Murray to Victorian explorer Isabella Bird; from Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole to Elizabeth Garrett Anderson to the Edinburgh Seven; from educational pioneer Maria Montessori to the barn-storming suffragette and composer Ethel Smyth; from comet hunter Caroline Herschel to the one and only Marie Curie; from the 13th century Mongolian princess, Khutulan, to Beatrix Potter.
Women of faith and conviction, women of conservation and law, the warrior queens and quiet revolutionaries. Each night the audience will meet the ‘mothers of invention’ and ‘pirate queens’; unsung pioneers of medicine and women’s rights, those who dazzled on the screen, the stage and in the sports stadium; those fought for what they believed and those who reached for the stars, and the female scientists whose work was overlooked or misattributed.
The Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries, The Show , will surprise, amaze, challenge and perhaps even encourage some in the audience to undertake a little family history of their own as we travel the world and through time: 23rd century Sumeria BCE to 19th century Japan, Revolutionary France to Germany in the 1940s, South Africa and New Zealand, Russia to China, Antarctica to South America, 15th century Ireland to 21st century Britain. From Manchester to Bristol, London to Edinburgh, Keswick to Preston, Cardiff to Penzance, come and spend an evening in the company of the amazing women who, in one way of another, also made our world.
‘My hope is that Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries will inspire as I have been inspired. It’s a love letter to history and about how, without knowing where we come from – truthfully and entirely - we cannot know who we are.’ Kate Mosse
Ticket information via:
www.katemosse.co.uk/events
https://www.facebook.com/KateMosseAuthor
https://twitter.com/katemosse
Kate Mosse
Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries Tour Dates
Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries Tour Dates
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Tuesday 14 March
Guildford, GLive 0343 310 0055 https://glive.co.uk/ 7.30 pm Wednesday 15 March Winchester, Theatre Royal 01962 840 440 https://www.theatreroyalwinchester.co.uk/ 7.30 pm Friday 17 March Basingstoke, Haymarket 01256 844244 https://www.anvilarts.org.uk/ 7.30 pm Saturday 18 March Worcester Swan Theatre 01905 611427 https://worcestertheatres.co.uk/ 7.30 pm Sunday 19 March Newcastle, Theatre Royal 0191 232 7010 https://www.theatreroyal.co.uk/ 7.30 pm Tuesday 21 March Bradford, St Georges Hall 01274 4342000 https://www.bradford-theatres.co.uk/ 7.30 pm Wednesday 22 March Keswick, Theatre by the Lake 017687 74411 https://www.theatrebythelake.com/ 7.30 pm Thursday 23 March Doncaster, Cast Theatre 01302 303 959 https://castindoncaster.com/ 7.30 pm Friday 24 March Scarborough Stephen Joseph Theatre 01723 370541 https://sjt.uk.com/ 7.30 pm Tuesday 28 March Buxton, Opera House 01298 72190 www.buxtonoperahouse.org.uk 7.30 pm |
Wednesday 29 March
Nottingham Playhouse 0115 941 9419 https://nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk/ 7.30 pm Thursday 30 March Westcliff on Sea Palace Theatre 0343 310 0030 https://southendtheatres.org.uk/ 7.30 pm Friday 31 March Portsmouth New Theatre Royal 023 9264 9000 www.newtheatreroyal.com 7.30 pm Sunday 2 April Eastbourne Devonshire Park Theatre 01323 412000 https://www.eastbournetheatres.co.uk/ 7.45 pm Tuesday 4 April Bury St Edmunds The Apex 01284 758000 www.theapex.co.uk 7.30 pm Wednesday 5 April Northampton Royal & Derngate 01604 624811 https://www.royalandderngate.co.uk 7.30 pm Thursday 6 April Crewe Lyceum Theatre 0343 310 0050 https://crewelyceum.co.uk/Online/tickets-kate-mosse-crewe-2023 7.30 pm Tuesday 11 April Shrewsbury Theatre Severn 01743 281281 https://www.theatresevern.co.uk/ 7.30 pm Wednesday 12 April Manchester The Lowry 0343 208 6000 https://thelowry.com/whats-on/ 8.00 pm Show Trailer can be watched here: https://vimeo.com/805992977
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KATE MOSSE INTERVIEW
BY JAMES RAMPTON
BY JAMES RAMPTON
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Q: What inspired you to turn your best-selling book, “Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World,” into your first ever live show?
A: I'm in my 60s now, and I like to have new challenges. You've got to be brave, haven't you? I love being a writer, but you can't just think, “I'll keep doing the thing that I've always done.” You've got to push yourself and keep trying. Q: Are you looking forward to performing this show live? A: Yes. I've really enjoyed book events in the past. I had been really disappointed during lockdown not to be out and about meeting readers. WQQR, the book, is a celebration of nearly 1000 incredible women from all periods of history and all corners of the globe. The tour will be the same. It was my lockdown project, researching all these amazing women – and turning detective for my own family history too - and I wouldn't have had time to do it otherwise. And then I thought, “I would just really enjoy sharing these stories with bigger audiences.” |
Q: What are you hoping to achieve with the show?
A: A really great night out in the theatre. It's for everybody. It's for girls and boys, men and women, dads and their daughters, mums and their sons, friends and neighbours. There will be music, props, a proper set, pictures – and me! I've never done anything like this before so, of course, I'm a little daunted. But I am going to give it my best shot. During the course of the show, as well as plenty fun facts and ‘did-you-knows’, I’ll tell the life stories of some of the most interesting, most inspiring, most astonishing women from the book - from Joan of Arc and Mary Seacole to Florence Nightingale and Agatha Christie, from the Mongolian princess Khutlan to Rosa Parks, from the notorious 18th century pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Reid to Beatrix Potter and the legendary English footballer, Lily Parr. Some of the stories are tragic, some are hilarious, and some make you gasp out loud because you can't quite believe it. My choices are inspired both by stories that are the most fun to share, at the same time as trying to give a flavour of all the different types of characters from in the book. (moved from below) But I want people to come out of the theatre just going, “Oh my God, I never knew that!”
Q: Have you had experience of live performance before?
A: Yes. Although this is the first time I've done a one woman show as a performer, I often compere or host big events at theatres and literary events, and I enjoying interviewing writers, actors, directors and performers. I wrote my first full-length play last year, an adaptation of one of my own novels called “The Taxidermist’s Daughter”. It was an honour that it opened the 60th anniversary season at Chichester Festival Theatre. My son Felix is in musical theatre, too, and so I have watched him preparing (roles include Marius in Les Misérables, Alex in Aspects of Love and Brad in Rocky Horror). Also, my husband teaches playwriting and is a playwright. So, I've always spent a lot of time in and around the theatre. I've just never been the main event before!
Q: Are you nervous about performing?
A: When you put yourself out there like this and do a theatre tour, I think the biggest nerves stem from the question: Will anybody come? In these times which are quite challenging at the moment, why would anybody give up their evening to come and see you? I'm not a celebrity, I'm not an actor. There have been times where I've interviewed people when we've been asking everybody to come down to the front because there are not enough people there. So, I have nerves about that and not letting everyone down. But once I'm in the wings, I will have that flutter of nerves, but I will love it. The show must go on!
Q: Do you feel an affinity with the theatre?
A: Definitely. I was taken to the theatre by my parents from a very young age. One time in particular, when I was six, I remember walking up into the auditorium of Chichester Festival Theatre, holding their hands, in my best party dress, as you did in those days, wearing white knee-length socks and Mary Jane shoes. Sitting in the auditorium that first time, as the lights went down, I remember that moment and thinking: “Oh, now I understand. This is where magic happens.” And I've never lost that feeling - whether I'm backstage about to go on to interview somebody, or when it was my own play, sitting in the audience as the lights went down. I still feel that flutter of expectation that anything could happen. I think that's what I'll feel when I'm backstage in the wings at my show. “All right, here we go, the lights have gone down. And this is where the magic happens.” But this time, it's going to be up to me to deliver it. Even as a punter, If I have a free evening, I go to the theatre. I’m still sold on live events. It's not the same for me watching a boxset or a film or something when all the creative decisions have already been made.
Q: What are you looking forward to about the tour?
A: I can't wait to see the faces of the audience. When I write a book, I put it out there and the reader takes it from my hands, and then the book’s completed. It's the same with the theatre tour. The show only exists when the audience is in the auditorium. Otherwise, it's just me and the wonderful stage manager and the sound and lighting guys, talking into silence. I love the idea that a theatre show will be different every night because the people who are there are different every night.
Q: What else?
A: I really love the UK. That sounds really old fashioned, and I don't mean it in a creepy, weird flag-waving kind of a way, but rather than we have a wonderful country. I’m hugely looking forward to travelling around Britain, going to places I don't know and seeing cities and towns that I might have heard of, but never visited. Everywhere I go, I hope I will have time to go out and about. If I possibly can, I will seek out a detective story or a novel set in that town because I think that's how you quite often get under the skin of a place.
Q: How will this differ from your previous live experience?
A: I am somebody who is usually off the cuff when I'm talking at a book event. But this is different because of course there are lighting and sound cues, props and music to coordinate, so I can’t go rogue! At the same time, in a live show anything can happen, so I’ll have to be on my toes.
Q: What will the main themes of the show be?
A: The show is a love letter to history – it’s why this is a show for anybody who loves history or is interested in family history – but it also asks the question: what is history? Who makes it? Who gets to decide what matters? Why do some people end up in the history books and others don't? I want to unravel the way that history gets written. Another theme is asking what, if anything, links all of these women? Are there special characteristics that come up time and again, regardless of place or time or the work a woman is doing? And I want the audience to feel that they are part of that conversation with me. Finally, it’s a celebration. I want people to feel inspired, empowered and delighted to have spent the evening in the company of so many trailblazers from the past.
Q: Can you give us a hint of what sort of props you'll be using?
A: One of the women in the show is the great British footballer, Preston's finest, Lily Parr. She is a legend who scored more than 1000 goals in her time. Her story is really illustrative of how once famous women are deliberately left out of history. When people say fans don't want to watch women playing football, that’s just not true. Women's football was the biggest sport in the early 20th century, particularly when most men were away in the trenches during the First World War. At that time, there was a famous Boxing Day match between the leading women's teams. Lily Parr played for Dick, Kerr’s Ladies team, and they played in the Boxing Day match in 1920 that was watched by 48,000 people. It was the biggest ever crowd for a women’s match … until the Lionesses winning the European Cup Final in 2022, of course!
Q: What happened next?
A: When the men came back from the war, the FA said, “We don't want this.” So they banned women from playing on their pitches. It was a decision to actively kill the women's game. That ban wasn't lifted till the 1970s. So when you look at Ellen White or Chloe Kelly or Megan Rapinoe, or any club team you admire who are finally get the attention they deserve, remember they are following in the footsteps of incredible, really successful footballers whose careers were taken away from them. So for the Lily Parr section of the show, we will obviously have some incredible footage of her, and the prop will be an original 1920’s football, which were much heavier than they are today.
Q: What other props will you be employing?
A: Ethel Smyth, the great British composer of The Wreckers and the suffragette anthem ‘The March of the Women’, was very active in the votes for women campaign. Independent, radical and forthright, she had lots of relationships with very famous women as well as possibly one man - nobody's quite sure about that. When she was arrested with hundreds of other suffragettes on Black Friday in 1912 for civil unrest stones and taken to Holloway Prison, the great conductor Thomas Beecham arrived to find Smyth conducting “The March of the Women” through the bars of her prison cell with her toothbrush. So, the question is: Do we have a baton on stage? Or a toothbrush? The show is going to be very playful. When people come into the theatre, they're going to be seeing all these plinths with props on and think: “I don't know what that is. I wonder who that could represent,” Because I want the audience to be guessing from the moment they sit down in their seats with their box of Maltesers or glass of Prosecco. It’s going to be a good night out!
Q: What other surprises will the show contain?
A: At every show, I will be asking the audience as they leave to nominate the one woman from history they would have put in my book. That way, together the audience and I will be building a massive library of women, many more even than the thousand I mention in my book. I’m hoping many of these will be important women locally who I won't have heard of. Putting women back into history, getting women’s names better known, is about repetition. Saying their names over and over again. After all, we know that women and men built the world together. This is not about ignoring all the wonderful men who've done incredible things (and some of the monsters), but rather putting the women back in. The more I go around the country, the more varied and regional the nominations will be.
Q: Will the women nominated have to be famous?
A: Not at all. People can nominate anybody they want. Some might be in the book, but many others will be less known outside their local community. Some will nominate people like “my mum”, which will also be wonderful. Because at the heart of my book is my own family story. I’m using my great grandmother's life as an example of how women do disappear from history. It’s why the title is “Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries.” It's often the women nobody knows who most changed the world for the people around them. Family history is important, we know it is just given less attention. We know about queens and the and the pirate commanders. But we don't know about all those quiet, gentle campaigning women who also made the world a better place.
Q: Tell us about investigating your great-grandmother and fellow novelist Lily Watson.
A: During lockdown, the most popular new hobby became genealogy, people tracing their family trees. Of course, at the heart of my book is my detective story about my own lost woman from history. Lily, who was a privileged middle class Victorian wife and mother, as well as a writer and educational reformer, is a good example of how easily women, even if they're famous and known in their day, can vanish. I had always known that my great grandmother ‘wrote’, but there was never a suggestion that it was a profession, or she was well known, or it mattered in any way. It was always delivered rather like an insignificant hobby, rather like saying: “Yes, she does flowers in church on a Sunday.” So, I was fascinated. I had always thought I was treading new ground in a family of teachers and lawyers and vicars. But it turns out that I was walking in my great grandmother's footsteps. It was also interesting to realise that she was really very popular and well known, yet now all of her books are now out of print. She doesn't appear anywhere in any biography of Victorian literature or women's writing. She's just vanished. And so I'm asking myself the question: How is that? Part of the show will be answering that question, because, as I said, so many people turned to tracing their family histories during lockdown.
Q: What did you find out about Lily?
A: That she and her husband, Sam, wrote to each other almost every day of their long and happy marriage – I have a trunk of nearly 500 letters waiting to be properly catalogued! I also discovered a devastating family secret, namely that all but one of her brothers and all three of her sons suffered from haemophilia. Her youngest son died when he was only twelve, and I realised that Lily never wrote any fiction again. After that, all she wrote were articles and nonfiction religious books. I suspect that she associated fiction with a different time of her life. Or perhaps after suffering the greatest loss any parent can have, her appetite for making things up just vanished. It’s tempting to think that if she had kept writing, her books would have stayed in plain view, but who’s to say. We have a lot in common. Landscape was at the heart of her fiction, as it is in mine. And she was very popular. When her most famous novel, The Vicar of Langthwaite, was published in 1893, Gladstone, the prime minister himself, wrote to the papers to say it he was delighted to have a new novel from Lily Watson. She was one of his favourite novelists. In the reissue, there's a foreword by him. It’s a wonderful novel and should be in print - I am doing my best to make that happen!
Q: What message are you hoping to impart through Lily's story?
A: That anyone, even if they are famous in their day, can be written out of the history books – it’s not necessarily deliberate, but more than people’s reputations can fade. A personal message is, if your older generation is still with you, talk to them. Having only just stumbled on Lily’s story, I am disappointed that my beloved dad, my wonderful aunt, and my very wonderful granny are no longer here for me to ask about their memories of her. I've now discovered so much, but I would love to be able to ask them, “What do you think about this?” So that's been the only moment of sadness in what has been a joyous project.
Q: Why have so many women disappeared from history?
A: I'm not a historian - although I read a lot of history and hang out with a lot of real historians – but I am somebody who's curious about the past. And that's what my readers like, whether it is nonfiction like Warrior Queens or in my novels. There are four different reasons – first, deliberate erasure of women from history. We're seeing that in Afghanistan and Iran at the moment, for example; second, because most history was written by men, within religious institutions and universities and places that were closed to women, they just did not believe that women did anything of value at all; third, achievements by women – painters, inventors, scientists, writers – have often been misattributed to the men who worked alongside them, or came after them. Finally, the question of legacy – if women didn’t have someone fighting to keep their reputation centre stage, then their works disappeared. But, together, we can change this.
Q: It’s a particular problem in science, isn’t it?
A: Yes, in science it is called the Matilda Effect – a phrase coined in 1993 by an American science writer called Margaret W Rossiter to refer to the routine attribution of women's discoveries to the men who worked for them, or alongside them, because the male science historians just didn't believe women could be scientists. Did you know that the great scientist Mary Somerville, who gave her name to Somerville College, Oxford, is the reason why we have the word “scientist”? Before her, the phrase was “men of science”, so the word “scientist” was created for Somerville because she was brilliant, but she was not a man! How else could they describe her?
Q: Any other examples?
A: The most notorious example is Lise Meitner, who in 1944 had to watch her colleague Otto Hahn being given the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their joint work on nuclear fission, even though he said, “She did this.” But the Nobel jury just couldn't believe it. Surely any rational person believes that you should be judged for what you do and say, not what you look like or where you come from. I think most of us would like to believe in a world of fairness, and it is profoundly unfair that many women's achievements have just been written out of history. As I say, the show is going to be fun – uplifting, positive, celebratory. I want people to come away from this show having come to that conclusion themselves and wanting their daughters and nieces to have the same chances as their sons and nephews.
Q: Where do you get your energy from?
A: Coffee (though, actually, I only drink decaf now …) On a serious note, I’ve never been one for sitting around and having a moan. If you think something's not quite as it should be, whatever it is, you've got two choices: to moan about it, or to do something about it. It's the great suffragette phrase: “Deeds, Not Words.” My wonderful parents brought me up to play my part. When I was growing up in our village in Sussex in the 60s and 70s, there wasn't an evening in our house when somebody wasn’t coming around for a committee meeting, or to stuff envelopes or put things through people's doors. So I grew up with this form of community-based activism.
Q: You start writing every morning at 4am. Is that the most productive way of working for you?
A: Yes, absolutely. I'm best at that liminal time between being asleep and being awake. Everybody knows that for a writer it's the fear of starting, the procrastination that does for you. So I've always been an early riser and early to bed person. I don't set an alarm, I just wake up when I wake up. My imagination has always been more active in the early morning. At that time, there's a great joy of being the one person awake in the house and writing. It means that I can get four, sometimes even five hours’ work done before I need to step into my other role as a carer, or load the dishwasher, or feed the dog, or get on a train to go to London for meetings! I've never been very good at writing in the afternoons, and I don't like working in the evenings. I'm asleep on the sofa by eight o'clock!
Q: Do you have time for hobbies?
A: I love what I do. I'm incredibly lucky that things have worked out for me so that I can do the thing I love as my day-to-day job. I still have to pinch myself, because that doesn't always work out for writers. I love being with my family and friends and walking across the field to the pub at lunchtime. I'm a big walker, so you could call that a hobby. It's a really sunny day today and I've got a lot to do, but I will make sure that I find time to go out for a walk across the fields. But I don't need other hobbies. Because I was an overnight success at the age of 45 (!) rather than when I was just starting out, I don't take anything for granted.
Q: Last year, you wrote a wonderful book about being the carer for your mother-in-law, Granny Rosie, called “An Extra Pair of Hands.” Do you feel that carers don't get the credit they deserve?
A: I’m afraid they don’t. Carers have been totally let down by politicians, particularly this Conservative government who promised an overhaul of the care system as part of their election manifesto back in in 2010 and have still failed to deliver. Without carers – most of whom are women - the whole of society would collapse. It's not that those of us who care wouldn't do it - I do it out of love. It's my job and my responsibility to do it. I was cared for by my parents wonderfully, and I love Granny Rosie. But a lot of people are caring for people who didn't care for them at all or they don't even like or know very well. Caring is women's work being taken for granted. It's the lowest paid of any of the statutory rights. But if women didn't care, nothing would function. Simple as that.
Q: You set up the Women's Prize for Fiction 28 years ago. Why do you think it still has such clout?
A: Because we were always very clear that it was about celebrating the very best and putting exceptional novels by women into the hands of men and women who’d appreciate them. It's exactly in the spirit of my tour, where, like the Prize, I will celebrate, honour and amplify incredible women from the past. Lots of people tried to attack us and say, “This is really sexist,” or said daft things like “If women were any good, they would win the real prizes”, so completely ignoring the stats of who was published and how few women were shortlisted for literary awards. But we were determined to shine a spotlight on excellent, original, dazzling novels by women, written in English from all over the world, and that is what we continue to do. And watch this space for a big announcement coming in February 2023.
Q: What feelings do you hope to engender in the audience for “Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries”?
A: Amazement, delight, gratitude for all those courageous women who fought for the rights we have now, curiosity about the world, a passion for history. I also want people to go home and think, “We need to protect the freedoms and the rights we have.” We're very lucky, most of us, to live in a country where, even if it's not quite true, women and men have equal rights and most people think they should be paid the same. In a country where our daughters and our sons can expect to be judged on their merits and not because they're a girl or a boy. We’re not quite there yet and, sadly, it isn't true for everybody in the world. I also hope the audience will leave inspired to search out even more women’s stories, so that a fab night in the theatre will be the beginning of a conversation for everybody. Wouldn’t it be great if people went home and talked to their friends who weren't there about some of the women they admire and ask why they're not better known? Let's get the conversation started.
Q: What else do you hope audiences will take away from the show?
A: I’m putting all these great stories out there, so that men and women, boys and girls, everyone, will come along to the show and be entranced, blown away, mesmerised by these tales. I believe in travelling hopefully, in trying to change the world for the better. Often, I think it’s easier to change hearts and minds by being positive stories rather than by being angry. For some people, of course, anger is very important and fuels their activism: sexism, racism, misogyny, religious intolerance, enslavement, war, a lack of equality or rights, quite rightly anger is what gives people the power to act. It’s what drives them forward. But, for this theatre show, what I want is a whole theatre full of people gasping, turning to each other and saying, “Oh, I never knew that!” and for them to leave feeling uplifted.
Q: Do you have a favourite story that will induce a gasp in the audience?
A: One of my favourites is the story of an American woman in Chicago called Josephine Cochrane. In the late 1880s, after I’m guessing she had clearly had enough of nobody else clearing up after meals, she left the kitchen, went to a shed at the bottom of the garden and invented the dishwasher. She was granted her patent in December 1886, and went on to found her own engineering company, the Garis-Cochrane Manufacturing Company. Of course, every woman and man in the audience will be laughing – the women, because we’re saying thank you, and the men because they don’t think any woman knows how to stack a dishwasher properly!
A: A really great night out in the theatre. It's for everybody. It's for girls and boys, men and women, dads and their daughters, mums and their sons, friends and neighbours. There will be music, props, a proper set, pictures – and me! I've never done anything like this before so, of course, I'm a little daunted. But I am going to give it my best shot. During the course of the show, as well as plenty fun facts and ‘did-you-knows’, I’ll tell the life stories of some of the most interesting, most inspiring, most astonishing women from the book - from Joan of Arc and Mary Seacole to Florence Nightingale and Agatha Christie, from the Mongolian princess Khutlan to Rosa Parks, from the notorious 18th century pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Reid to Beatrix Potter and the legendary English footballer, Lily Parr. Some of the stories are tragic, some are hilarious, and some make you gasp out loud because you can't quite believe it. My choices are inspired both by stories that are the most fun to share, at the same time as trying to give a flavour of all the different types of characters from in the book. (moved from below) But I want people to come out of the theatre just going, “Oh my God, I never knew that!”
Q: Have you had experience of live performance before?
A: Yes. Although this is the first time I've done a one woman show as a performer, I often compere or host big events at theatres and literary events, and I enjoying interviewing writers, actors, directors and performers. I wrote my first full-length play last year, an adaptation of one of my own novels called “The Taxidermist’s Daughter”. It was an honour that it opened the 60th anniversary season at Chichester Festival Theatre. My son Felix is in musical theatre, too, and so I have watched him preparing (roles include Marius in Les Misérables, Alex in Aspects of Love and Brad in Rocky Horror). Also, my husband teaches playwriting and is a playwright. So, I've always spent a lot of time in and around the theatre. I've just never been the main event before!
Q: Are you nervous about performing?
A: When you put yourself out there like this and do a theatre tour, I think the biggest nerves stem from the question: Will anybody come? In these times which are quite challenging at the moment, why would anybody give up their evening to come and see you? I'm not a celebrity, I'm not an actor. There have been times where I've interviewed people when we've been asking everybody to come down to the front because there are not enough people there. So, I have nerves about that and not letting everyone down. But once I'm in the wings, I will have that flutter of nerves, but I will love it. The show must go on!
Q: Do you feel an affinity with the theatre?
A: Definitely. I was taken to the theatre by my parents from a very young age. One time in particular, when I was six, I remember walking up into the auditorium of Chichester Festival Theatre, holding their hands, in my best party dress, as you did in those days, wearing white knee-length socks and Mary Jane shoes. Sitting in the auditorium that first time, as the lights went down, I remember that moment and thinking: “Oh, now I understand. This is where magic happens.” And I've never lost that feeling - whether I'm backstage about to go on to interview somebody, or when it was my own play, sitting in the audience as the lights went down. I still feel that flutter of expectation that anything could happen. I think that's what I'll feel when I'm backstage in the wings at my show. “All right, here we go, the lights have gone down. And this is where the magic happens.” But this time, it's going to be up to me to deliver it. Even as a punter, If I have a free evening, I go to the theatre. I’m still sold on live events. It's not the same for me watching a boxset or a film or something when all the creative decisions have already been made.
Q: What are you looking forward to about the tour?
A: I can't wait to see the faces of the audience. When I write a book, I put it out there and the reader takes it from my hands, and then the book’s completed. It's the same with the theatre tour. The show only exists when the audience is in the auditorium. Otherwise, it's just me and the wonderful stage manager and the sound and lighting guys, talking into silence. I love the idea that a theatre show will be different every night because the people who are there are different every night.
Q: What else?
A: I really love the UK. That sounds really old fashioned, and I don't mean it in a creepy, weird flag-waving kind of a way, but rather than we have a wonderful country. I’m hugely looking forward to travelling around Britain, going to places I don't know and seeing cities and towns that I might have heard of, but never visited. Everywhere I go, I hope I will have time to go out and about. If I possibly can, I will seek out a detective story or a novel set in that town because I think that's how you quite often get under the skin of a place.
Q: How will this differ from your previous live experience?
A: I am somebody who is usually off the cuff when I'm talking at a book event. But this is different because of course there are lighting and sound cues, props and music to coordinate, so I can’t go rogue! At the same time, in a live show anything can happen, so I’ll have to be on my toes.
Q: What will the main themes of the show be?
A: The show is a love letter to history – it’s why this is a show for anybody who loves history or is interested in family history – but it also asks the question: what is history? Who makes it? Who gets to decide what matters? Why do some people end up in the history books and others don't? I want to unravel the way that history gets written. Another theme is asking what, if anything, links all of these women? Are there special characteristics that come up time and again, regardless of place or time or the work a woman is doing? And I want the audience to feel that they are part of that conversation with me. Finally, it’s a celebration. I want people to feel inspired, empowered and delighted to have spent the evening in the company of so many trailblazers from the past.
Q: Can you give us a hint of what sort of props you'll be using?
A: One of the women in the show is the great British footballer, Preston's finest, Lily Parr. She is a legend who scored more than 1000 goals in her time. Her story is really illustrative of how once famous women are deliberately left out of history. When people say fans don't want to watch women playing football, that’s just not true. Women's football was the biggest sport in the early 20th century, particularly when most men were away in the trenches during the First World War. At that time, there was a famous Boxing Day match between the leading women's teams. Lily Parr played for Dick, Kerr’s Ladies team, and they played in the Boxing Day match in 1920 that was watched by 48,000 people. It was the biggest ever crowd for a women’s match … until the Lionesses winning the European Cup Final in 2022, of course!
Q: What happened next?
A: When the men came back from the war, the FA said, “We don't want this.” So they banned women from playing on their pitches. It was a decision to actively kill the women's game. That ban wasn't lifted till the 1970s. So when you look at Ellen White or Chloe Kelly or Megan Rapinoe, or any club team you admire who are finally get the attention they deserve, remember they are following in the footsteps of incredible, really successful footballers whose careers were taken away from them. So for the Lily Parr section of the show, we will obviously have some incredible footage of her, and the prop will be an original 1920’s football, which were much heavier than they are today.
Q: What other props will you be employing?
A: Ethel Smyth, the great British composer of The Wreckers and the suffragette anthem ‘The March of the Women’, was very active in the votes for women campaign. Independent, radical and forthright, she had lots of relationships with very famous women as well as possibly one man - nobody's quite sure about that. When she was arrested with hundreds of other suffragettes on Black Friday in 1912 for civil unrest stones and taken to Holloway Prison, the great conductor Thomas Beecham arrived to find Smyth conducting “The March of the Women” through the bars of her prison cell with her toothbrush. So, the question is: Do we have a baton on stage? Or a toothbrush? The show is going to be very playful. When people come into the theatre, they're going to be seeing all these plinths with props on and think: “I don't know what that is. I wonder who that could represent,” Because I want the audience to be guessing from the moment they sit down in their seats with their box of Maltesers or glass of Prosecco. It’s going to be a good night out!
Q: What other surprises will the show contain?
A: At every show, I will be asking the audience as they leave to nominate the one woman from history they would have put in my book. That way, together the audience and I will be building a massive library of women, many more even than the thousand I mention in my book. I’m hoping many of these will be important women locally who I won't have heard of. Putting women back into history, getting women’s names better known, is about repetition. Saying their names over and over again. After all, we know that women and men built the world together. This is not about ignoring all the wonderful men who've done incredible things (and some of the monsters), but rather putting the women back in. The more I go around the country, the more varied and regional the nominations will be.
Q: Will the women nominated have to be famous?
A: Not at all. People can nominate anybody they want. Some might be in the book, but many others will be less known outside their local community. Some will nominate people like “my mum”, which will also be wonderful. Because at the heart of my book is my own family story. I’m using my great grandmother's life as an example of how women do disappear from history. It’s why the title is “Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries.” It's often the women nobody knows who most changed the world for the people around them. Family history is important, we know it is just given less attention. We know about queens and the and the pirate commanders. But we don't know about all those quiet, gentle campaigning women who also made the world a better place.
Q: Tell us about investigating your great-grandmother and fellow novelist Lily Watson.
A: During lockdown, the most popular new hobby became genealogy, people tracing their family trees. Of course, at the heart of my book is my detective story about my own lost woman from history. Lily, who was a privileged middle class Victorian wife and mother, as well as a writer and educational reformer, is a good example of how easily women, even if they're famous and known in their day, can vanish. I had always known that my great grandmother ‘wrote’, but there was never a suggestion that it was a profession, or she was well known, or it mattered in any way. It was always delivered rather like an insignificant hobby, rather like saying: “Yes, she does flowers in church on a Sunday.” So, I was fascinated. I had always thought I was treading new ground in a family of teachers and lawyers and vicars. But it turns out that I was walking in my great grandmother's footsteps. It was also interesting to realise that she was really very popular and well known, yet now all of her books are now out of print. She doesn't appear anywhere in any biography of Victorian literature or women's writing. She's just vanished. And so I'm asking myself the question: How is that? Part of the show will be answering that question, because, as I said, so many people turned to tracing their family histories during lockdown.
Q: What did you find out about Lily?
A: That she and her husband, Sam, wrote to each other almost every day of their long and happy marriage – I have a trunk of nearly 500 letters waiting to be properly catalogued! I also discovered a devastating family secret, namely that all but one of her brothers and all three of her sons suffered from haemophilia. Her youngest son died when he was only twelve, and I realised that Lily never wrote any fiction again. After that, all she wrote were articles and nonfiction religious books. I suspect that she associated fiction with a different time of her life. Or perhaps after suffering the greatest loss any parent can have, her appetite for making things up just vanished. It’s tempting to think that if she had kept writing, her books would have stayed in plain view, but who’s to say. We have a lot in common. Landscape was at the heart of her fiction, as it is in mine. And she was very popular. When her most famous novel, The Vicar of Langthwaite, was published in 1893, Gladstone, the prime minister himself, wrote to the papers to say it he was delighted to have a new novel from Lily Watson. She was one of his favourite novelists. In the reissue, there's a foreword by him. It’s a wonderful novel and should be in print - I am doing my best to make that happen!
Q: What message are you hoping to impart through Lily's story?
A: That anyone, even if they are famous in their day, can be written out of the history books – it’s not necessarily deliberate, but more than people’s reputations can fade. A personal message is, if your older generation is still with you, talk to them. Having only just stumbled on Lily’s story, I am disappointed that my beloved dad, my wonderful aunt, and my very wonderful granny are no longer here for me to ask about their memories of her. I've now discovered so much, but I would love to be able to ask them, “What do you think about this?” So that's been the only moment of sadness in what has been a joyous project.
Q: Why have so many women disappeared from history?
A: I'm not a historian - although I read a lot of history and hang out with a lot of real historians – but I am somebody who's curious about the past. And that's what my readers like, whether it is nonfiction like Warrior Queens or in my novels. There are four different reasons – first, deliberate erasure of women from history. We're seeing that in Afghanistan and Iran at the moment, for example; second, because most history was written by men, within religious institutions and universities and places that were closed to women, they just did not believe that women did anything of value at all; third, achievements by women – painters, inventors, scientists, writers – have often been misattributed to the men who worked alongside them, or came after them. Finally, the question of legacy – if women didn’t have someone fighting to keep their reputation centre stage, then their works disappeared. But, together, we can change this.
Q: It’s a particular problem in science, isn’t it?
A: Yes, in science it is called the Matilda Effect – a phrase coined in 1993 by an American science writer called Margaret W Rossiter to refer to the routine attribution of women's discoveries to the men who worked for them, or alongside them, because the male science historians just didn't believe women could be scientists. Did you know that the great scientist Mary Somerville, who gave her name to Somerville College, Oxford, is the reason why we have the word “scientist”? Before her, the phrase was “men of science”, so the word “scientist” was created for Somerville because she was brilliant, but she was not a man! How else could they describe her?
Q: Any other examples?
A: The most notorious example is Lise Meitner, who in 1944 had to watch her colleague Otto Hahn being given the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their joint work on nuclear fission, even though he said, “She did this.” But the Nobel jury just couldn't believe it. Surely any rational person believes that you should be judged for what you do and say, not what you look like or where you come from. I think most of us would like to believe in a world of fairness, and it is profoundly unfair that many women's achievements have just been written out of history. As I say, the show is going to be fun – uplifting, positive, celebratory. I want people to come away from this show having come to that conclusion themselves and wanting their daughters and nieces to have the same chances as their sons and nephews.
Q: Where do you get your energy from?
A: Coffee (though, actually, I only drink decaf now …) On a serious note, I’ve never been one for sitting around and having a moan. If you think something's not quite as it should be, whatever it is, you've got two choices: to moan about it, or to do something about it. It's the great suffragette phrase: “Deeds, Not Words.” My wonderful parents brought me up to play my part. When I was growing up in our village in Sussex in the 60s and 70s, there wasn't an evening in our house when somebody wasn’t coming around for a committee meeting, or to stuff envelopes or put things through people's doors. So I grew up with this form of community-based activism.
Q: You start writing every morning at 4am. Is that the most productive way of working for you?
A: Yes, absolutely. I'm best at that liminal time between being asleep and being awake. Everybody knows that for a writer it's the fear of starting, the procrastination that does for you. So I've always been an early riser and early to bed person. I don't set an alarm, I just wake up when I wake up. My imagination has always been more active in the early morning. At that time, there's a great joy of being the one person awake in the house and writing. It means that I can get four, sometimes even five hours’ work done before I need to step into my other role as a carer, or load the dishwasher, or feed the dog, or get on a train to go to London for meetings! I've never been very good at writing in the afternoons, and I don't like working in the evenings. I'm asleep on the sofa by eight o'clock!
Q: Do you have time for hobbies?
A: I love what I do. I'm incredibly lucky that things have worked out for me so that I can do the thing I love as my day-to-day job. I still have to pinch myself, because that doesn't always work out for writers. I love being with my family and friends and walking across the field to the pub at lunchtime. I'm a big walker, so you could call that a hobby. It's a really sunny day today and I've got a lot to do, but I will make sure that I find time to go out for a walk across the fields. But I don't need other hobbies. Because I was an overnight success at the age of 45 (!) rather than when I was just starting out, I don't take anything for granted.
Q: Last year, you wrote a wonderful book about being the carer for your mother-in-law, Granny Rosie, called “An Extra Pair of Hands.” Do you feel that carers don't get the credit they deserve?
A: I’m afraid they don’t. Carers have been totally let down by politicians, particularly this Conservative government who promised an overhaul of the care system as part of their election manifesto back in in 2010 and have still failed to deliver. Without carers – most of whom are women - the whole of society would collapse. It's not that those of us who care wouldn't do it - I do it out of love. It's my job and my responsibility to do it. I was cared for by my parents wonderfully, and I love Granny Rosie. But a lot of people are caring for people who didn't care for them at all or they don't even like or know very well. Caring is women's work being taken for granted. It's the lowest paid of any of the statutory rights. But if women didn't care, nothing would function. Simple as that.
Q: You set up the Women's Prize for Fiction 28 years ago. Why do you think it still has such clout?
A: Because we were always very clear that it was about celebrating the very best and putting exceptional novels by women into the hands of men and women who’d appreciate them. It's exactly in the spirit of my tour, where, like the Prize, I will celebrate, honour and amplify incredible women from the past. Lots of people tried to attack us and say, “This is really sexist,” or said daft things like “If women were any good, they would win the real prizes”, so completely ignoring the stats of who was published and how few women were shortlisted for literary awards. But we were determined to shine a spotlight on excellent, original, dazzling novels by women, written in English from all over the world, and that is what we continue to do. And watch this space for a big announcement coming in February 2023.
Q: What feelings do you hope to engender in the audience for “Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries”?
A: Amazement, delight, gratitude for all those courageous women who fought for the rights we have now, curiosity about the world, a passion for history. I also want people to go home and think, “We need to protect the freedoms and the rights we have.” We're very lucky, most of us, to live in a country where, even if it's not quite true, women and men have equal rights and most people think they should be paid the same. In a country where our daughters and our sons can expect to be judged on their merits and not because they're a girl or a boy. We’re not quite there yet and, sadly, it isn't true for everybody in the world. I also hope the audience will leave inspired to search out even more women’s stories, so that a fab night in the theatre will be the beginning of a conversation for everybody. Wouldn’t it be great if people went home and talked to their friends who weren't there about some of the women they admire and ask why they're not better known? Let's get the conversation started.
Q: What else do you hope audiences will take away from the show?
A: I’m putting all these great stories out there, so that men and women, boys and girls, everyone, will come along to the show and be entranced, blown away, mesmerised by these tales. I believe in travelling hopefully, in trying to change the world for the better. Often, I think it’s easier to change hearts and minds by being positive stories rather than by being angry. For some people, of course, anger is very important and fuels their activism: sexism, racism, misogyny, religious intolerance, enslavement, war, a lack of equality or rights, quite rightly anger is what gives people the power to act. It’s what drives them forward. But, for this theatre show, what I want is a whole theatre full of people gasping, turning to each other and saying, “Oh, I never knew that!” and for them to leave feeling uplifted.
Q: Do you have a favourite story that will induce a gasp in the audience?
A: One of my favourites is the story of an American woman in Chicago called Josephine Cochrane. In the late 1880s, after I’m guessing she had clearly had enough of nobody else clearing up after meals, she left the kitchen, went to a shed at the bottom of the garden and invented the dishwasher. She was granted her patent in December 1886, and went on to found her own engineering company, the Garis-Cochrane Manufacturing Company. Of course, every woman and man in the audience will be laughing – the women, because we’re saying thank you, and the men because they don’t think any woman knows how to stack a dishwasher properly!