Cherry Potts, Writer

Category: The Historical Birthday-Tea Party

  • The Historical Birthday-Tea Party 12th January

    No famous birthday today, but three for tomorrow so let’s celebrate Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (aka Amanda Cross) January 13, 1926 – October 9, 2003 a day early. She’d probably quite like getting in early, she never was one for conventions. Described as the Mother of feminist academia (personally not sure I’d want to be described as…

  • The Historical Birthday-Tea Party 11th January

    Another date with no dame. So here is Jane Anger. Possibly a pseudonym, possibly her real name, but whoever she was she had a way with words once she got a head of steam on, and went into print in 1589 in  defence of women, in response to a scurrilous pamphlet, defiantly entitling her broadsheet…

  • The Historical Birthday-Tea Party 10th January

    That enchantress, Abigail Hill Masham. Here’s a nice obscure lesbian for you – no birthdate, (best guess 1670’s) but sufficiently influential because of her relationship with Queen Anne to have caused quite a furore in her lifetime. If you know anything about Queen Anne and her female friends, then it is probably Sarah Churchill you…

  • The Historical Birthday-Tea Party 9th January

    January 9th – Simone de Beauvoir‘s birthday, but she’s not invited to the party. Sometimes you know too much about a person to find them appealing. Instead, let’s have Aisha bint Ahmed al-Qurtubiyya I’ve no idea when her birthday is, as she was born in Córdoba, Spain in 965 and died in either 999 or…

  • The Historical Birthday-Tea Party 8th January

    Sound the Trumpets for Bathsua Reginald Makin, another woman of unknown birthdate, some time around 1608. A child prodigy who spoke mulitple languages and published at the age of sixteen. (You’d think that would make it easier to guess her birthday wouldn’t you). A very clever woman and an excellent self publicist, she became tutor…

  • The Historical Birthday-Tea Party 7th January

    No-one is owning up to being born on 7th January, so another ‘who knows?’ And because it’s wild weather I thought we’d go for a pirate. Mary Read. Cross-dressing lover of Anne Bonny, and several men, a proper swashbuckler, served in the King’s army, ran a pub and later became a pirate, but no one…

  • The Historical Birthday-Tea Party 6th January

    Today’s birthday belongs to Stella Benson, 1892-1933 a feminist, writer and traveller (particularly America and China). She was a friend of Virginia Woolf, and of Winifred Holtby. She wrote  travel books, poetry, novels and short stories. She died rather young, but I can’t help feeling she got a lot of fun from life while she…

  • The Historical Birthday-Tea Party 5th January

    No convenient birthday for 5th January so the first of the ‘who knows?’ BIERIS (Biatritz) DE ROMANS Thirteenth Century Trobairitz (Female Troubadour – writer of songs) from Romans-Sur-Isère. Writing from around 1200-1235. Probably nobility since she could read and write. The tune does not survive.  During and following the Albigensian Crusade, troubadours were treated with…

  • The Historical Birthday-Tea Party January 4th

    The matchless Orinda – Katherine Phillips. Her birthday is actually 1st January 1631 but she deserved a really class party so I’ve waited til now. She was also known as the English Sappho. (So were lots of women poets, it didn’t mean what we think it would mean now, just that she was a poet,…

  • The Historical Birthday-Tea Party January 3rd

    Today’s birthday girl is Henry Handel Richardson (don’t you love a male nom-de-plume?) known to her family as Ethel Robertson. Born 3rd January 1870 HH wrote the lovely and semi-autobiographical coming of age novel The Getting of Wisdom about Laura, a young Australian girl sent away to school where she finds it hard to fit…