A cross-dressing sailor, renowned pick-pocket, and a mad Duchess — the women of Holly Kyte’s Roaring Girls are anything but boring. By exploring the lives of eight broadly unknown women from early modern British history through to the eighteenth century, Holly Kyte asks what it meant to strain at the limits of womanhood before feminism was even a nascent movement.

You can buy Roaring Girls — now in paperback — here.