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Disclaimer: ARC read via Netgalley. Might be changes before final publication. Improbable Women is not a bad book. It really isn’t. Yet, I wanted it to be so much more than it was, and in some way it felt like a letdown. Part of this reaction is due to my own preferences when it comes to reading history, and part of it is something else. Mr. Cotterman is clearly fascinated by the women that he details in this book – Queen Zenobia, Lady Hester Stanhope, Jane Digby, Isabella Burton, Gertrude Bell, and Freya Stark. The idea of the book is that all the “modern” women are connected not just by their travels in the Middle East, but also by a trip to Palmyra, ruled in the past by Queen Zenobia, hence the section on her. And this is where it goes slightly pear shaped. The idea is good, but for several of the women, if you blink, you miss the trip to Palmyra. There is no real connection between the women and Zenobia, no sense that they were fascinated by her, no sense that Palmyra fascinated them. This isn’t a bad thing really. The women - Stanhope, Digby el Mesrab, Burton, Bell, and Stark – are all fascinating, and so is Zenobia. It just doesn’t feel like Zenobia belongs in this book with the other women. The reason why she is in the book at all seems to be because Zenobia was a fascinating character. She challenged Roman rule. The section on Zenobia was interesting, though perhaps too romanticized, how do we know, for instance, that she loved stories about Cleopatra and Boudicca? It’s a nice image, but we don’t know. I know some readers of history do not mind this type of speculation, but it isn’t my thing, so take this criticism with a grain of salt. What you shouldn’t take with a grain of salt is the following criticism. At times, many times, it seems as if Cotterman is more obsessed with the women’s sex lives than their lives of exploration. It wasn’t all that surprising that Isabella Burton had the shortest chapter because she had the most conservative sex life. Perhaps this done to get readers, but it feels like a disservice to the women. Furthermore, the focus on affairs takes the place of more interesting life details – why did Stanhope refuse to see Queen Caroline when she had been a lady in waiting to the queen (a fact that is revealed in the el Mesrab chapter, why was Caroline too scandalous for the scandalous Stanhope), why did she and her sister not exchange letters for so long. I understand the book’s strutuce precludes a detailed biography, but the emphasis does not have to be on lovers. It doesn’t even tie to Zenobia, whom supposedly was chaste. This opposition might be interesting if Cotterman comments on it, but he doesn’t. In addition to the emphasis on sef lives, there is an old line about the women being braver than others. I don’t think Cotterman meant the line to be condescending and dismissive of women, but it comes across that way. IF Cotterman really looked at why the five modern women were able to break social taboos, seemingly because of family support and money in some degree, the statement might come across as less insulting. Because it he doesn’t, it feels like these women were head and shoulders above all women who couldn’t do anything, which is simplistic and ignores women like the suffragettes, and implies that five women here were manly men, an idea that is re-enforced by the emphasis on their relationships with men, and only men.Yet, it is an interesting book because these women should be better remembered than they are. We celebrate T. E. Lawrence, but Gertrude Bell whose work helped Lawrence and who worked with him politically, is disregarded and all but forgotten. Stark did work that was important in the Second World War, Burton helped her husband but we remember best her destruction of his work after his death, Stanhope and Digby (el Mesrab) changed the culture of their times. Cotterman does admire the women not for who they slept with, but for what they did. And that makes up for much.
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