In this collection of essays, Naomi Clifford explores the lives of women whose stories we have forgotten or have never known.

Meet Eliza Fenning, a servant whose ability to read proved fatal; teenager Maria Glenn, dragged through the courts by a vengeful would-be suitor; Susanna Meredith, who devoted herself to improving the lives of convicted women; Margaret Larney, pregnant and condemned to death; Mary Ashford, whose woeful end was staged on the opening night of a famous theatre; and French anarchist Louise Michel, welcomed, to the consternation of the great and the good, on a fact-finding visit to a London workhouse.