I've picked out two of the books I read this month which look, in their different ways, at issues around women's agency in a patriarchal society. First is The Invader , a novel by Hilda Vaughan. It's followed by John Sutherland's biography of Mrs Mary Ward.  The Invader, Hilda Vaughan (William Heinemann, 1928) The Invader is Welsh author Hilda Vaughan’s ( 1892–1985) third novel. Daniel Evans is a sheep farmer whose Welsh hill farm is centred around the eighteenth-century house, Plas Newydd. The farm belongs to an absent English landlord who has no interest in it apart from receiving the rents. Daniel passionately loves his house and his land and has been saving up for years to buy the property. He is one lambing season short of raising the capital. Disaster strikes when the owner dies and the property is inherited by English woman Miss Webster, who teaches in an agricultural college. Miss Webster decides to farm the land herself, and Daniel is ousted and rele...

There’s an idea behind this book which I sympathise with, and that’s the way people too often accept myths about history for truth. The present uses the past to reflect its own ideologies and sensibilities: myths have their uses. Sweet suggests that the purpose of widely-accepted notions such as ‘the Victorians were dreadful prudes’ is “to satisfy our sense of ourselves as liberated Moderns”. There are other motives for devising historical myths, of course, such as the use of certain interpretations of history to uphold a particular political system or ideology. In the same way, how we view history is affected by stereotypes that linger in the present. However, if we are to base our opinions on the rock of what we know rather than the quicksand of what we think we know, it’s important to separate myth from reality. So I’m all for challenging historical myths and the stereotypes that often underpin them. It’s disappointing, then, to discover that the author draws the line at challen...

In all the commemorations around the one hundredth anniversary of votes for (some) women, it’s easy to forget that there were many women who didn’t want the vote. In 1908 a National Women’s Anti-Suffrage League was formed. It later combined with the Men’s League to form the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage. One of the leaders of the anti suffrage movement was best-selling novelist Mrs Humphry Ward (1851-1920). Amongst my collection of suffrage books are signed copies of two of Mrs Humphry Ward’s works. The first is England’s Effort: Six Letters to an American Friend (1916) written to encourage America to join the war. The other is the 1910 novel Lady Merton, Colonist , inside which is a copy of the order of service for Mrs Humphry Ward’s funeral. Mrs Humphry Ward made her anti-suffrage views known not only through her public speaking but through her novels. In 1915 she published an anti-suffrage novel, Delia Blanchflower , which tells the story of the eponymou...