The Times Great Women’s Lives: A Celebration in Obituaries

This selection of Times obituaries revisits the lives of 125 women who have all, in their own way, played an important part in women’s educational, professional, social, cultural and emotional journey over the best part of two centuries. The anthology starts with the obituary of 91-year-old pioneering mathematician and scientist Mary Somerville (d. 1872) and concludes with that of 110-year-old concert pianist and Holocaust survivor Alice Herz-Sommer (d. 2014). In between come a formidable trio of later scientists, a quintet of great pianists, campaigners, reformers, suffragists, an anti-apartheid campaigner, and a Nobel Prize-winning environmentalist. Interspersed are women prime ministers, actresses, novelists, singers, aviators, a mountaineer, a Channel swimmer, war correspondents, ballerinas, sportswomen, botanists, US first ladies, iconic members of the British royal family, and many, many more. AUTHOR: Great Women’s Lives is the seventh in a series of anthologies of Times obituaries. The subjects for inclusion have been selected by the book’s general editor, Sue Corbett (a writer of Times obituaries since 2000), in consultation with Ian Brunskill, the newspaper’s obituaries editor from 1999 to 2013. 30 b/w illustrations