The Women's Cycling

The women's cycling on Sunday was a thrilling race. Here are the three medalists in the order they crossed the finishing line. Marianne Vos of the Netherlands won the gold, Lizzie Armistead the silver, and winning Great Britain's first medal of the game. The bronze went to Olga Zabelinskaya of Russia. The weather was not great with heavy rain, and many riders just had bad luck with so many punctures and several tumbles. It was a hard race, a well deserved win for these three.

A lesser-known side of Marie Stopes

The Library has recently added to the catalogue a copy of Marie Stopes' little-known first (and only) novel, Love's Creation, published in 1928 under the rather transparent pseudonym of 'Marie Carmichael' (Stopes' mother's maiden name was Carmichael and her own full name was Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes). The copy was Stopes' own and is inscribed with her address inside the front cover.

Stopes is, of course, well-known for her best-selling works on marriage and birth control and related topics in sexual enlightenment. A few people have heard of her poetry (which was turned down for publication by Faber, politely but firmly, by T. S. Eliot) or of her plays, several of which achieved production, or of the film, Maisie's Marriage, which she scripted in order to convey the birth control message to a wider audience.

Love's Creation, however, remains a unique venture, at least in terms of having actually achieved publication. The copy in the Wellcome Library is a first edition, although it is probably truer to say the only edition as there were no reprints and no demands by publisher or literary agent to produce a successor, since it sold poorly. Neither did it gain critical recognition, being largely dismissed, when reviewed at all, with a brief notice rather than extensive critical discussion. One notice indeed described it as 'old-fashioned', and this seems not unjust when we consider that other works appearing on the literary scene in 1928 included Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, and Aldous Huxley's Point Counterpoint. Mary Abbott, a friend of Stopes, suggested in a letter to her that the furore around Hall's novel of lesbian advocacy might have had a knock-on impact on libraries and booksellers, making them cautious of anything that might turn out to be scandalous, but this seems rather improbable as an explanation for the popular and critical apathy which greeted Love's Creation.

Since Stopes was working on versions of the novel that eventually appeared in 1928 for a period of some twelve years, it presumably had some particular personal significance for her, given the many other demands on her time and energies. Although she at one time had considered embodying the ideas about marriage that eventually became her best-selling manual Married Love in fictional form, Love's Creation does not appear to be the fictional version of her message to 'young husbands and all who are betrothed in love'.

The novel begins with the arrival of a female scientist in a laboratory previously all male. While one might hope that this might become the largely untold tale of a woman in science, it soon turns into the romance between Lilian and her colleague Kenneth. Shortly after their marriage, Lilian dies in a road accident. A second strand of the plot is the story of her younger sister, Rose Amber, and her disastrous marriage. Meanwhile, the widowed Kenneth throws up his university position in favour of travel for scientific purposes (his experiences very closely mirror Stopes' as recounted in her Journal from Japan, 1910). Its depiction of the characters and roles of women and men seems strangely conventional given Stopes' own pioneering career and achievements. It depicts one marriage abruptly terminated by accidental death and one made hellish by the husband's pathological jealousy (this may well draw on Stopes' experiences in her first marriage). While the ending promises a future union along the lines set out in Married Love, such an ideal is nowhere presented fictionally within the novel. The story is also, for a realist work, curiously unanchored in history: it is never clear whether the action is taking place before or after the Great War, which is never mentioned. There is also an entire chapter putting forward a 'large cosmic theory' through the mouth of Kenneth. Stopes, who was capable of producing non-fictional works which were and are extremely readable and which early readers found compelling, had less success when it came to telling a story.

It seems probable that very few people have ever read this novel: I only did so when I was invited to contribute a chapter on Stopes - 'Uniting Science and Sensibility: Marie Stopes and the Narratives of Marriage in the 1920s' - to the essay collection Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals: British Women Writers 1889-1939 edited by Angela Ingram and Daphne Patai (University of North Carolina Press, 1993). It remains, however, a historical curiosity and a sidelight on the complex character of Marie Stopes.

Crimes Against Women

A new reminder that this was the area where the infamous Jack the Ripper murders took place.

Never solved, it still baffles those who investigate the events in Victorian London.

I nearly missed this small work that sits at footpath level and is about 6 inches high.
Crimes against women are making headlines around the world again at present. The ex-head of the IMF and the British Minister of Justice who seems confused as to what rape is.

Scaling the walls of the citadel

Today's Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Life of the Day is the pioneering woman doctor, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. She was admitted to the Medical Register in 1865, having received the Licentiate in Medicine of the Society of Apothecaries as the result of a loophole which was promptly closed.


Archives and Manuscripts recently acquired a Garrett Anderson letter, 26 April 1891: to Mrs Fitch, extending a lunch invitation and asking whether Mr Fitch might let her have a look at the Report of the Commission on London University, for a paper she was writing on the Medical Women's Association. This has been added to the file of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson autograph letters - MS.7776.


The Medical Women's Association mentioned in the letter was the Association of Registered Medical Women of London, founded in 1879, when, following various legal and educational changes, several other women besides Garrett Anderson were inscribed on the Medical Register as permitted to practise. There are relatively sparse records surviving of this body of pioneer women, but the archives of the successor body, the Medical Women's Federation, now held in the Wellcome Library, do include the earliest minute book and a few other items.


An online sources guide provides a brief overview of Archives and Manuscripts' substantial holdings on women in medicine since the medieval period; a further guide provides information on sources about women in nursing, midwifery and health visiting.

Mrs Bennett -- before and after

These two paintings are part of an archive of Georgian paintings and drawings which appear to come from Leeds. Works from this old Yorkshire collection have been appearing in dribs and drabs, from several different dealers, since 2004. This pair of portraits was among the first works from the collection to have been acquired by the Wellcome Library.

The two portraits show the same person, "Mrs Bennett", before and after treatment. The one on the left is inscribed "Mrs Bennett. Disease from 1818 to 1821", and shows Mrs Bennett in a lace cap and night-gown, afflicted with a skin disease (or a skin manifestation of systemic disease) covering most of her face and parts of her neck and chest. The painting on the right, showing her perfectly recovered, is inscribed "Under cure from from 1818 to 1821". These could well be the first clinical Before-and-after pictures in the Wellcome Library. A few others are listed here, though the list is certainly not exhaustive.

These two paintings are also the first items in this archive to have been conserved: when they were acquired, they were both ragged and unstretched pieces of painted canvas. Now they have been cleaned, lined and stretched, and are ready for framing. To see them in greater detail, click on the images above.

Yes, a Georgian Mrs Bennett. And if you are struggling to remember when Pride and prejudice, featuring a Hertfordshire family of Bennetts, was published, the answer is 1813 – not so long before this Yorkshire Mrs Bennett entered into the care of the (as yet unknown) physician, surgeon or apothecary who commissioned these two paintings of her.

Wellcome Library: left no. 603108i, right no. 603109i

'Archivist, Historian and Trailblazer'

The first issue of new history magazine HerStoria, includes a feature on Dr Lesley Hall, Senior Archivist at the Wellcome Library, the title of which we've quoted above.

The article rightly hails Lesley's work as both an archivist and historian:

"If you are a Radio 4 listener, Lesley Hall's name may be familiar. Over the past year or so her voice has been heard regularly over the airwaves, including on the Archive Hour programme 'Love at the Lighthouse' about Marie Stopes and on Case Notes, talking about the history of abortion. Lesley has also cropped up on on Women's Hour several times where she explored various aspects of the history of women's health such as medical attitudes to childbirth and the treatment of women's cancers.

As well as being an archivist at the Wellcome Library in London, Lesley is also one of the UK's leading historians of sexuality. Her books include Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain (2000) and Outspoken Women (2005) an anthology of women's writing on sex between 1870-1969.

Lesley's contribution to the development of women's history as a discipline, and to bringing it to a wider audience, has been tremendous. She has achieved this in part by encouraging people to look at history from a fresh perspective and discover different histories. Some ten or so years ago Lesley was one of the first to set up a website that explored and reflected on issues in women's history (almost 'blogging' even before the term was invented)".

The article also describes and is illustrated by some of the many sources for women's history available at the Wellcome Library. The issue of Herstoria also includes a Women's History Walk around Bloomsbury, designed by Lesley (and still available through her website).

Kitchen sink dramas

Is it just me, or does recipe-swapping seem to be spreading across the media like a benign virus? Every weekend paper worth its salt has a recipe-exchange corner nowadays, while online you’re spoilt for choice, from the reassuring videos on What's Cooking Grandma? to the erudite and frankly surreal offerings on Ken Albala’s Food Rant.

Recipes have long been a staple of the print media, but perhaps the economic downturn is sharpening our appetite? Recipe-swapping is just so comforting – it gives us a warm glow to imagine ourselves thrifty cooks using up those leftovers, to recall beloved family and friends through meals shared, to enter a virtual community of fellow swappers.

Popular interest in recipes is matched by a growth in academic research into historical recipe collections. You would expect to find food history and material culture on the menu, but recipe collections provide rich pickings for a wider range of themes including women as medical practitioners, cultural and economic trends, and the literary role of recipes in life-writing.

Research by Elaine Leong and Sara Pennell on recipe exchange as a form of currency highlights just how familiar our recipe-swapping would seem in early modern England. 17th century housewives didn’t blog, but their recipe collections were as interactive as any wiki, the frequent amendments and annotations reflecting their compilers’ social, familial and economic networks.

The issue of trust spans the centuries - both manuscript and online swappers need to make judgements about the reliability of the recipe’s source. As Leong and Pennell show, the same criteria came into play then as now – do we know the source personally? If not, do we have a friend in common? Or is the source trustworthy by professional reputation?

Well, I’ve think I’ve talked myself into swapping some recipes. As my cooking is definitely not worth trusting, I’ll share some from the Wellcome Library’s manuscript collection. Digital images of the 17th century recipes are now available online, so to tempt you into exploring this rich resource and to test your kitchen skills to the limit, I’ll be posting 17th century recipes here from time to time. To start things off, I’ll do a little name-dropping with a recipe for ‘Sugar Cakes’ from Lady Ann Fanshawe, the wife of Charles II’s ambassador to Portugal and Madrid:

‘Take 2 pound of Butter, one pound of fine Sugar, ye yolkes of nine Egs, a full Spoonfull of Mace beat & searsed [sifted], as much Flower as this will well wett making them so stiffe as you may rowle it out, then with the Cup of a glasse of what Size you please cutt them into round Cakes & pricke them and bake them.’ (Reference MS.7113, p.286)


Let us know how you get on…

Medical women's obituaries

A useful new biographical resource has been added to the catalogue of the archives of the Medical Women's Federation (SA/MWF).

Thanks to the painstaking work of Emma Milliken, an index to the obituaries of women doctors which appeared in the various differently entitled incarnations of its Newsletter/Quarterly Review/Journal has been added to the 'Notes' field of the collection level description of SA/MWF.

To find it, go to A&M Catalogue at Search Interface input SA/MWF into Reference field and Collection into Level field > click on the blue numeral in the lefthand column of hitlist to reach detailed entry and then scroll down.

The index can be browsed there: or individual names can be searched via the Any Text field of the catalogue. Though please note that it will only provide references to the relevant volumes, not access to the actual obituaries.