Theodore Stanton – författare

Regarded as the foremost animal painter of her time and the most famous female artist of the nineteenth century, Rosa Bonheur (1822-99) is best known for her works Ploughing in the Nivernais and The Horse Fair. She showed an early talent for drawing people and animals, and quickly determined that art would be her career, visiting the abattoirs of Paris and performing dissections in order to better understand animal anatomy. Through her independent spirit, successful career and unconventional lifestyle she made men and other women aware of what could be achieved. Of the various sources of biographical detail about Bonheur, this 1910 publication is among the most authoritative. Incorporating translated letters between the artist and her friends and family members, it provides invaluable first-hand evidence of her approach to painting and her views on the art world more widely. The work is illustrated throughout with many fine engravings.

The American journalist Theodore Stanton (1851-1925), son of the leading feminist and suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, published this remarkable collection of essays in 1884. His intention had been to get from each European country 'the collaboration of one or more women, who ... had participated, either actively or in spirit, in some phase of the women's movement'. In seventeen chapters, all but two written by women, the progress of 'the woman question' - the debate on the rights of women to financial independence, higher education and the franchise - across Europe (and in the Ottoman empire) is described, largely for an American and British readership. The work, introduced by the veteran feminist Frances Power Cobbe, has among the contributors (each given a short biography) many famous names in the struggle for women's rights at the end of the nineteenth century, including (from Britain) Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Jessie Boucherett and Maria Grey.