To mark International Women's Day, the staff at Maggs have individually handpicked items from our stock which are written by or are about women.
Scroll down to see their choices.
Euphemia
Far East – Japan & China
This is a beautiful book of poetry and paintings by one Japan’s leading feminist writers, Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951). She grew up in extremely tough circumstances and wrote a famous autobiographical novel called Diary of a Vagabond, which propelled her into the literary limelight. What I love about this book is the use of ‘boku’ which is the informal he/him pronoun in Japanese, and the way she writes many of the poems from the male gaze.
Fumiko Hayashi, Omokage: boku no sobyo [My Face: a Sketch]. (Showa 8, i.e. 1933)
Chris
Early British
"See Wollstonecraft, whom no decorum checks, / arise, the intrepid champion of her sex": a remarkably savage poem "concerning the essential nature and societal role of women" (ODNB) by pitching Mary Wollstonecraft's supposed radical feminism against the "genius and literary attainments" of Hannah More and her fellow Bluestockings.
This book was re-published in 1974 amidst a reassessment of feminist thinking and powerfully illustrates the danger of dividing women into crude factions as a way of subduing protest by women as a whole.
Richard Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females: a Poem, Addressed to the Author of the Pursuits of Literature. (1798)
Bonny
Modern Literature
I have chosen this book from the library of Julia MacRae. It is a first edition of In the Night Kitchen, inscribed to her and with a letter from Maurice Sendak. MacRae was a key figure in children's book publishing and one of the first women to become a board member in any publisher's boardroom.
In an interview with ‘Women in Publishing: An Oral History’, MacRae speaks about her experiences as the first woman to become a member of the board at Hamish Hamilton and of how hard she had to work to get there. MacRae went on to set up her own imprint.
Throughout her career she developed close relationships with the authors she worked with, as is made so clear by the warm notes left to her in the books and correspondences in the small collection we acquired.
You can read the full interview with Julia MacRae here.
Maurice Sendak, In the Night Kitchen (1970)
Hazel
Early European Books & Illuminations
I've chosen this depiction of St Catherine, contained within the large initial ‘G' of a handsome, mid-sixteenth-century choirbook leaf from the Southern Netherlands.
The scene is rather a grim one - Catherine is about to be executed, and the morbidly eponymous wheel on which she was tortured stands in the background - but what the saint herself represents, isn't. According to her hagiography, Catherine's death was the last resort of an exasperated Emperor (Maxentius) who had tried to force her to renounce Christianity by inviting her to debate, in the hope that she would be intimidated by the philosophers and thinkers he had ranged against her. Instead, Catherine is said to have converted many of her interlocutors with her intellect and erudition, including the Emperor's own wife, Valeria Maximilla.
Southern Netherlands Artist, The Martyrdom of St. Catherine, in an initial on a choirbook leaf. Southern Netherlands (perhaps Delft), dated 1541 (more probably 1544).
Gus
Philosophy & Economics
A particularly nice copy of this excellent short history of the suffrage movement by one of its principal leaders.
Millicent Fawcett, Women’s Suffrage. A Short History of a Great Movement (1912)
Titus
Far East — China & Japan
Maryse Choisy (1903-1979) was a modernist French writer and fighter for the emancipation of women. The present work is a translation of L’Amour dans les Prisons [Love in Prisons], first published in 1930. Subtitled a ‘Reportage’, it is a study of the effects of prison-life on prisoners - in particular on their sexual lives - based on Choisy’s own observations.
Maryse Choisy, translated by Kiyoshi Sakai, Gokuchu seiai kiroku [A Record of Love in Prison]. (1931)
Fuchsia
Travel
Violet Olivia Cressy-Marcks lived a huge life. Active in the first half of the twentieth century, she was a socialite, explorer, geographer, reporter, cinematographer and possibly a spy. She knew how to spin a good yarn, and when she wasn't driving reindeer sledges across the Arctic or fighting piranhas in the Amazon, she was touring the UK lecturing about her adventures. Known by the nickname "the Lone Wolf", she revelled in the opportunity to expand her horizons. She befriended Emperor Haile Selassie in Ethiopia, and interviewed Chairman Mao in China. Meanwhile, the British press was largely preoccupied with her hairstyle (a daring bob) and her choice of names for her children (Ocean and Forest). This archive of letters, photos, ephemera, and personal copies of her books came down by descent through her family. I think I've received more requests from researchers about it than any other item!
Violet Olivia Cressy-Marcks, A small archive of her books, photographs and related ephemera (c. 1915-1970).
Chosen together by the Travel Department
Essentially a superhero, Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910) was the first woman in the US to earn a medical degree. Along with her similarly-qualified sister, Emily, she opened the New York Infirmary for Women and Children in 1857. This is her first book, which was also the first published by a female physician.
Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, The Laws of Life, with special reference to the Physical Education of Girls. (1858)
