Good morning everyone,

What is up! I hope you are enjoying the sunshine and that you're looking forward to a newsletter of women from the 1920s and 30s. I've been reading Virginia Nicholson's Singled Out, which is about the generation of women who came of age during the First World War and who found themselves outnumbering men by a much bigger margin than they expected.

The contemporary commentary on this situation was more or less what you would expect. But LOOK at this delightful caricature of a "literate spinster with her busy little brain". If you are looking for a new profile pic, you could do much worse than this:

There were lots of stories of women drowning their heartbreak in the life of the mind (notably archaeology, which seems to be a time honoured way for a woman to get over heartbreak) but my favourite thing was the opening of Gordon Holmes' autobiography. Gordon was the first woman to run a stockbrokers and she was tremendously successful at it:

Have I ever been in love? Always. In love with life, with people, projects, things, thought. Always in love, always some star on the horizon.

What an answer to the question "have you ever been in love". Always. Just beautiful.

Finally, here's a treat for you all from my personal archive. When my great-grandfather was a young man, a private in the First World War, his own father gave him an autograph album as a gift. These were fashionable then, your friends would write doggerel verse and draw pictures in them, and now it's a beautiful thing to look through and to hear these voices of people from the far past. Some of these voices, of course, are women's, and this has been my favourite entry for as long as I can remember. Let's meet Bessie:

Lots of love,

Alex.