Hullo,

I am in New York! This information is not relevant to today’s Fem Friday, which looks at the first women to do things, specifically writing books.

Long time subscribers will know that I am a fan of the writings of Mother Julian of Norwich, the first woman to write a book in English. This interesting article talks about the life of an anchorite, who chose to live permanently shut up in a room attached to a church. Perhaps not a life any of us would choose, but this article casts a lot of light on the influence they had:

although they had just two or three small windows letting a sliver of the outside world into their chambers, anchorites were influential. They could give counsel from the wisdom they accrued in their contemplative lives, and in this way, have an outsized impact on the places and communities they lived in.

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-first-woman-to-publish-a-book-in-english-lived-in-a-room-attached-to-a-church-and-walled-off-from-the-rest-of-the-world

From the first book written by a woman at all, let’s get a little more specialist; the first person to write a grammar of Old English was also a woman, and a woman of habits counter to the then mainstream:

the Middle Ages were generally considered barbarous and unworthy of study in an age which was under the sway of Neo-Classicism and the faraway splendours of ancient Greece and Rome. Few men studied medieval history or literature, and even fewer women had the opportunity to learn the languages necessary to access medieval primary sources. However, when Elizabeth moved to London to live as her brother’s housekeeper in 1702, she gained a degree of relative freedom and was able to apply herself to learning Old English.

http://www.historytoday.com/yvonne-seale/first-female-anglo-saxonist

Aphra Behn was not the first woman to write a fiction play or a novel, but Wikipedia characterises her as “one of” the first and I am not one to make the perfect the enemy of the good enough:

she was appointed an intelligence gatherer for the king, who was, at least, to pay for her trip to Antwerp as his spy. But Charles did not respond to Behn's requests for money for her trip home, so in December 1666 she was forced to borrow for her passage back to England. Charles continued to refuse payment, and in 1668 Behn was thrown into debtor's prison. The circumstances of her release are unknown, but in 1670 her first play, The Forc'd Marriage (published, 1671), was produced in London, and Behn, having vowed never to depend on anyone else for money again, became one of the period's foremost playwrights.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/aphra-behn

Happy Friday,

Alex.