Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in Women

Dr. Liz O'Riordan is a breast cancer surgeon who has battled against social, physical and mental challenges to practice at the top of her field. Under the Knife charts Liz's incredible highs: performing like a couture dressmaker as she molded and reshaped women's breasts, while saving their lives; to the heart-breaking lows of telling ten women a day that they had cancer. But this memoir is more than just an eye-opening look at the realities of training to be a female surgeon in a man's world

From the outset, Caroline Lamb had a rebellious nature. From childhood she grew increasingly troublesome, experimenting with sedatives like laudanum, and she had a special governess to control her. She also had a merciless wit and talent for mimicry. In 1812 Caroline embarked on a well-publicized affair with the poet Lord Byron—he was 24, she 26. Her phrase 'mad, bad and dangerous to know' became his lasting epitaph. Antonia Fraser's biography animates the life of 'a free spirit' who was far more than mad, bad and dangerous to know.

Falling pregnant as a teenager in 1952, Philomena Lee was sent to the convent in Co. Tipperary to be looked after as a fallen woman. She cared for her baby for three years until the Church took him and sold him, like countless others, to America for adoption. She spent the next 50 years secretly searching for him, unaware that he was searching for her from across the Atlantic.

In June 1952, a woman was murdered by an obsessive colleague in a hotel in South Kensington. Her name was Christine Granville. That she died young was perhaps unsurprising, but that she had survived the Second World War was remarkable. She was one of Britain’s most daring and highly decorated secret agents, and the intelligence she gathered was a significant contribution to the Allied war effort.

Antonia Fraser's memoir describes growing up in the 1930s and 1940s but its real concern is with her growing love of history. The fascination began as a child when her evacuation at the beginning of the war to an Elizabethan manor house became an inspiration for historical imaginings - and developed into an enduring passion; as she writes, 'for me, the study of History has always been an essential part of the enjoyment of life'.

In the summer of 1990, Cathy's brother, Matty, was knocked down by a car on the way home from a night out, two weeks before receiving his GCSE results. Sitting by his unconscious body in hospital, holding his hand and watching his heartbeat on the monitors, Cathy and her parents willed him to survive. They did not know then that there are many fates worse than death.

Part memoir, part travelogue, this is the story of one woman's six years as an outsider in a reindeer-herding village in the Arctic Tundra, forging a life on her own in one of the most unknowable cultures on earth. An ancestry test suggesting she shared some DNA with the Sámi people, the indigenous inhabitants of the Arctic tundra, tapped into Laura Galloway's wanderlust; an affair with a Sámi reindeer herder ultimately led her to leave New York for the tiny town of Kautokeino, Norway.

Alice Carrière tells the story of her unconventional upbringing in Greenwich Village as the daughter of a remote mother, the renowned artist Jennifer Bartlett, and a charismatic father, European actor Mathieu Carrière. From an early age, Alice is forced to navigate her mother's recovered memories of ritualized sexual abuse, which she turns into art, and her father's confusing attentions. Her days are a mixture of privilege, neglect, loneliness, and danger—a child living in an adult's world, with little-to-no enforcement of boundaries or supervision.

Vera Holme, known as Jack, left a career as a jobbing actress to become Emmeline Pankhurst's chauffeur and mechanic. Evelina Haverfield was a classic beauty, the daughter of a Scottish baron and fourteen years older than Jack. They met in 1909, fell in love, lived together, and became public faces of the suffragette movement, enduring prison and doing everything they could for the cause.

The remarkable story of Margaret Paston, whose letters form the most extensive collection of personal writings by a medieval English woman.

From the beginning of their lives, the Olivier sisters stood out: surprisingly emancipated, strikingly beautiful, markedly determined and alarmingly 'wild'. Rupert Brooke was said to be in love with all four of them; D. H. Lawrence thought they were frankly 'wrong'; and Virginia Woolf found them curiously difficult to read. The sisters seemed always to be one step ahead of their time. Margery and Daphne studied at Cambridge when education was still thought by some to be damaging to ovaries.

Drawing on letters and diaries, some of which have never been published before, this book will reveal Jane Austen's bond with a family servant, the amateur playwright Anne Sharp, how Charlotte Brontë was inspired by the daring feminist Mary Taylor, the transatlantic relationship between George Eliot and the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the underlying erotic charge that lit the friendship of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield - a pair too often dismissed as bitter foes.

Aim High reveals what has motivated Dame Tanni Grey Thompson, the UK's leading wheelchair athlete, through the highs and lows of her outstanding career. Her triumphs, which include winning 16 medals, 11 of which are gold, countless European titles, six London Marathons and over 30 world records, have catapulted this Welsh wheelchair athlete firmly into the public consciousness.

It's 1956, and the Berkshire Constabulary has never had a woman detective before. That is, until bright and ambitious WPC Gwen Crockford passes out of Hendon Detective Training School with flying colours... After five years serving as one of Britain's first policewomen, Gwen Crockford becomes one of its first female detectives. Swapping crime prevention for detection, she must soon become comfortable with attending murder scenes and post-mortems, investigating sex crimes and going undercover.

It's the dawn of the Swinging Sixties. The Cold War is at its height and support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is building. The Berkshire Constabulary's Detective Gwen Crockford is promoted to Woman Police Sergeant in Newbury – the town at the heart of Britain's atomic weapons program. Gwen's initial reservations that her posting in rural Berkshire will be boring soon prove to be unfounded. A serial sex attacker on the loose, an attempted murder at Greenham Common US Airforce Base, and a charismatic heiress with a family secret keep things interesting for the capable sergeant.

Cynthia's mother is dying. Often. Travelling between her home in Scotland and California, as she spends time at her mother's bedside. Cynthia recalls her youthful adventures: living in a squat, train-hopping, hitchhiking and all the other things she never told her mother.

In 2015, Juno Carey left her job as a midwife, burnt out, frustrated and looking for a better way to deliver care to women. And then she found work that she loves, that brings her satisfaction and the knowledge of helping women, directly and fundamentally, every day. Working in an abortion clinic is not easy, but it is a necessary kindness: Juno's work changes and even saves lives. In this book she shares the stories of the patients she helps there, young and old, single and married, vulnerable and stoical.

Enid Lindeman stood almost six feet tall, with silver hair and flashing turquoise eyes. The girl from Strathfield in Sydney stopped traffic in Manhattan, silenced gamblers in Monte Carlo and dared walk a pet cheetah on a diamond collar through Hyde Park in London. In early twentieth-century society, when women were expected to be demure and obedient, the granddaughter of Hunter Valley wine pioneer Henry Lindeman waltzed through life to the beat of her own drum.

Scouted by a modelling agent when she was sixteen years old, Cameron Russell approached her job with scepticism. She was a precocious and serious student with her sights set on college—not the runway. But modelling seemed to offer young women like her access to wealth, fame, and influence. Besides, as she was often reminded, there were 'a million girls in line' to replace her.

In the wake of World War II, four agents were critical in helping build a new organisation now known as the CIA. Adelaide Hawkins, Mary Hutchison, Eloise Page, and Elizabeth Sudmeier, called the "wise gals" by their male colleagues because of their sharp sense of humour and even quicker intelligence, were not the stereotypical femme fatale of spy novels. They were smart, courageous, and groundbreaking agents at the top of their class, instrumental in both developing innovative tools for intelligence gathering—and insisting that they receive the credit and pay their expertise deserved.