Working remotely: five formidable female anthropologists

I was first sent a version of Undreamed Shores: The Hidden Heroines of British Anthropology in June last year. I started my review; but publication was delayed. So I tore up my opening paragraphs, which began with the remark that only armchair travel was possible at present. By 2021, I imagined, that would be out of date.

How wrong I was. Ten months later, and the book engages even more urgently. We can all sympathise even more sharply with those female would-be explorers who longed to escape from the restrictions of their lives — though an Edwardian tea party now seems to us like unimaginable freedom.

The past is a foreign country; so there are two layers of escape here. Frances Larson has picked five intrepid women from the remote tribe of early female students at Oxford — that small band of outliers on the fringes of a largely hostile male society.