From pioneering doctors to fearsome warriors – and the author of the first ever novel – Sandi Toksvig picks her favourite females from history
The trouble with a lot of women in history is that we just don’t know that much about them. I would love to have met Murasaki Shikibu but she would have been tricky to find as this was not even her real name. She was born in Japan at a time when women were neither educated to write nor were their names recorded for posterity. In English she is referred to as Lady Murasaki and what we do know is that she wrote if not the world’s first novel then certainly the first novel that is still considered a classic. She learnt classical Chinese by listening to her brother’s lessons and wrote in her diary how often her father regretted that she was not a boy. Murasaki’s book The Tale of Genji was written after the death of her husband. It became so popular that she was asked to serve as a lady-in-waiting to the Empress. Sadly, she found court life dull but it gave her plenty to write about.
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