The frontispiece of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management of 1861 looks uncannily like the photographs on the walls of branches of Fresh 'n' Wild, which show the store's various artisanal and ethical suppliers in their natural habitats. In Mrs Beeton's version, an extended family group clusters around the door of a cottage at harvest time. The men are plump John Bulls. The principal female figure is serving them beer, [...]

It is now a hundred years since the suffragette movement embarked on the decade that came to define it, the decade of mass rallies, hunger strikes and letter-box fires, of chains and railings and rushes on parliament, and of the tiny, fierce and lovely Emmeline Pankhurst.

It was in October 1903 that Pankhurst, a 45-year-old widow born, bred and married into the tradition of Manchester Liberalism, founded the Women's Social [...]

The walls of grand country houses are hung with paintings that speak of leisure and pleasure: ladies wearing court dress; gentlemen in their best wigs; spooky-looking children who might be of either sex lolling around looking as if the long, summer afternoon of their pre-eminence will never end. The subhuman is there, too. There are endless paintings of dogs, muddy and exhausted from the shoot, and plenty of horses, racers [...]

The campaign to get women the vote was one of the first political movements to take place in a fully seeing age. Heroic images of a tiny Mrs Pankhurst being lifted off the ground by policemen, or rows of classical-looking girls hooped with WSPU sashes, have become stock stand-ins for a narrative that was actually lengthy, episodic and often dull (try slogging through the minutes of a single committee meeting [...]

Teenage girls were not invented in the 1950s. While Queen Victoria was gearing up for her Golden Jubilee, a good proportion of her subjects was worrying not about Empire or falling exports but about spots, boys, hips and kissing. Nor is there anything new about the fierce need of other people - older women, usually - to tell young girls just where they are going wrong. Eliza Lynn Linton, a [...]

It is 1980 and I am about to meet the parents of my first proper boyfriend. He and I have bonded at Oxford over Bede and discovered that we are soulmates whose thoughts coincide on every subject. There are a few superficial differences between us - he is from a Manchester working-class family and I am a Home Counties princess - but basically we feel so close that it is [...]

The Methodists are at present thinking about uniting - or, to be quite accurate, reuniting - with the Church of England. This is something they have been periodically pondering over the past 30 years, but this time it looks as if it might just go ahead. There are one or two little things that will need to be sorted: the Methodists don't have bishops or parishes and they definitely don't [...]

To read Queen Bees and Wannabes is to be plunged back into the dark state of perpetual watchfulness that is teenage girlhood. At 15, just walking into a room of so-called friends was an ordeal: would there be a sudden silence or an odd look? Worse still, a stifled snigger? By such signs you knew at once whether you were still alive and viable, or whether you had become an [...]

The life and fiction of Rosamond Lehmann were in many ways indistinguishable from a superior Mills and Boon: there were dark and difficult heroes and relationships that had to be waited and worked for. Where Lehmann parted company with the template of popular romance was in her endings. Things had a habit of turning out badly, for both herself and her heroines. Terrified of being abandoned, even at the age [...]

As far as the George Orwell industry is concerned, Sonia Orwell was pure poison. Married to the great man for only his last few spluttering months in 1949-50, she seized control of his name, his work, his reputation and guarded them like a nasty bulldog.

Charged in Orwell's will with ensuring that there would never be a biography, Sonia executed her duty with an unholy zeal, blocking access to his [...]