Undreamed Shores: Five Women Who Sought Out the World (Paperback) - Dr Frances Larson

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Katherine Routledge, Maria Czaplicka, Winifred Blackman, Beatrice Blackwood and Barbara Freire-Marreco set out to explore the furthest reaches of the globe. Resisting pernicious sexism and misogyny, they were among the first women to study at university and went on to chart now-vanished worlds, seeking new freedoms in in the wastelands of Siberia, the uncharted interior of New Guinea, on Easter Island, and in the villages of the Nile. Yet upon their return to England, they found only loss, madness and regret waiting for them. An extraordinary insight into women's suffrage at the turn of the century and a revelatory study of Britain's colonial legacy, Undreamed Shores is an extraordinary portrait of a pioneering quintet whose struggles helped usher in a brighter dawn.

About the Author

Dr Frances Larson is the author of Severed, a Sunday Times Book Of The Year, and a biography of Henry Wellcome, An Infinity of Things, a Sunday Times Book of The Year and a New Scientist Best Book of 2009. She is an honorary research fellow at the University of Oxford.