Kathryn Hughes

Feminists in Wimples

A new book about the lives of four medieval women offers an engaging if flawed perspective on the past.

An Entry of One’s Own

A collection of excerpts from women’s diaries written over the past four centuries offers a vast range of human experience and a subtle counterhistory.

Written by Paw

In novels and magazines from the turn of the last century, cats started speaking their minds. What if they were talking about us?

The Dress Form

“Clothes don’t simply provide an outline of the unclothed body. They tell us so much about the wearer’s engagement with their own arrangement of sinew and muscle, and the accommodations that they are obliged to make with the wider world.”

Jane Austen Gets Dressed

Sifting through the trove of well-preserved garments that belonged to Jane Austen, a new study offers a surprising new glimpse of the novelist’s life.

A Complicated Reformer

Adherents to Maria Montessori’s radical methods have extended from progressive parents to Benito Mussolini.

Department of Speculation

A new book on the history of a group of British clairvoyants charged with predicting disasters maintains a scrupulous neutrality as to whether these precognitions were coincidences or supernatural happenings.

The White Heat of Conviction

There is nothing judicious, careful, or patient in Frances Wilson’s new biography of D.H. Lawrence, which is exactly how Lawrence would have wanted it.

Bliss in That Dawn

Private Lives

The Inglenooks of Power

Happy as a Hedgehog