by Rita Bullwinkel
An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family's unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of the eight teenage girl boxers in this blistering debut novel has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to come to Reno, Nevada, to compete to be named the best in the country. Through a series of face-offs that are raw, ecstatic, and punctuated by flashes of humor and tenderness, prizewinning writer Rita Bullwinkel animates the competitors' pasts and futures as they summon the emotion, imagination, and force of will required to win.
Frenetic, surprising, and strikingly original, Headshot is a portrait of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness, and sheer physical pleasure that motivates young women to fight—even, and perhaps especially, when no one else is watching.
Anyone who's participated in, or even attended, a sports tournament knows about the intensity of that concentrated frame of competition; for a period of hours or days, time ceases to exist. All that matters is what's happening on the court, on the field, or—in the case of Rita Bullwinkel's debut novel, Headshot—in the ring. Set amid the glow of the fluorescent lights of Bob's Boxing Palace (a converted warehouse) in Reno, Nevada, Headshot recounts the drama that is the 12th Annual Daughters of America Cup, pitting eight of the country's best 18 and under girl boxers against one another over two days in July.
Some of the boxers—like the seemingly prophetically named Artemis Victor (the youngest of the three champion Victor sisters)—are favored to win, while others are longshots at best. Some have family members among the paltry crowd of onlookers while others drove to Reno alone from as far away as Florida, Texas, and New Mexico.
The novel is structured like a tournament—in a series of bouts between rival boxers, beginning with the semifinals and culminating with the ultimate match. Bullwinkel is an accomplished writer of short fiction, and each of these bouts reads much like a short story, one in which characters' past and future selves revolve around the turning point of the present moment, where the only thing that exists is the body and its physical, violent relationship to another body. The narration, which unfolds without a single line of dialogue, also vividly demonstrates the relationship between mind and body, as each character's lived experience swirls around these bloody battles in the ring.
Andi Taylor, who meets Artemis Victor in the opening match, is haunted by a tragedy from her recent past. Kate Heffer finds mental stillness and focus by reciting the digits of pi. Her first-round opponent, Rachel Doricko, throws her combatants off-kilter by adopting an unsettling persona (including donning a Daniel Boone-style hat when she's not in the ring). Rose Mueller boxes to overcome a traumatic bullying experience, while Tanya Maw boxes to forget—at least for a few minutes at a time—the mother who abandoned her. Bullwinkel also grants readers glimpses of each girl's future, years or decades after she's quit boxing, in which these brief moments in the ring are a minor footnote or the pinnacle of achievement.
The girls' stories, as well as the past and the future, collapse into one another, expanding and contracting continually over the course of the novel. And that's kind of the crux of it all; as the narrative notes at one point, "If you stand in the middle of the ring you can send your mind up through the hole of the worlds built by the other girl boxers. You can travel through the layers of different imagined futures, and the different ways each girl has of being." This technique, this constant shifting of viewpoints and timeframes, has the effect of making the narrative feel simultaneously immediate and timeless, both intimate and expansive. These characters are at once intensely specific and universal.
Bullwinkel plays with preconceptions about gender and femininity, stressing each boxer's physicality, strength, and size while also showing how they actively resist categorization: "What a sad thing, to be a good girl ... mountains and mountains worse than good boy. There can't be a single girl in here who wants to be just fine." She shows the fragility of the line between good-natured but ribald playground hand-clapping rhymes and the aggression and release these girls pursue in the ring. In doing so, she vividly and viscerally interrogates preexisting notions of girlhood, of appropriate kinds of play, and of every girl's possible future.
Book reviewed by Norah Piehl
Rita Bullwinkel's novel Headshot depicts the intensity and intimacy of a girl's boxing tournament. Although women's boxing was only officially introduced to the Olympics in 2012 and was banned by the USA Boxing organization before 1993, accounts of women boxing date back to the 1700s. Here are just a few of the trailblazing women boxers throughout the history of the sport.
Nell Saunders and Rose Harland
These two competed in the first known women's bout in the United States, taking place in New York City in 1876. The prize? A silver butter dish.
Cathy ("Cat") Davis
Davis, born in 1952, was the first woman to be featured on the cover of the boxing magazine Ring, in 1978. She also, along with fellow boxers Marian Trimiar and Jackie Tonawanda, successfully challenged the state of New York for the right to box there. Unfortunately, her legacy was tarnished when her manager/boyfriend, Sal Algieri, was accused of "fixing" the results of boxing matches.
Marian ("Lady Tyger") Trimiar
Trimiar, born in 1953, has been a staunch advocate for women's boxing. In addition to fighting for the right to box in New York State, in 1987 Trimiar conducted a month-long hunger strike to protest unequal conditions for female boxers. She said, "Unless women get more recognition, we will be fighting just as a novelty for the rest of our lives. There will be no future."
Christy Martin and Lucia Rijker
These two athletes are the first women to be inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, in a 2020 ceremony. Martin, known as the Coal Miner's Daughter, boxed professionally from 1989 until 2012, frequently appearing on the undercard of globally famous male boxers like Evander Holyfield. Rijker, known as the Dutch Destroyer, boxed from 1996 to 2004 and was unbeaten both in her boxing and previous kickboxing career.
Katie Taylor
Taylor is an Irish boxer who won the gold medal in the lightweight division at the 2012 Olympic Games after lobbying for the IOC (International Olympic Committee) to officially include the women's sport and carrying the Irish flag during the opening ceremonies. Since then she has continued to amass victories, becoming only the eighth boxer in history—male or female—to hold all four major boxing world titles—WBA (World Boxing Association), WBC (World Boxing Council), IBF (International Boxing Federation), and WBO (World Boxing Organization)—simultaneously. Taylor, along with Amanda Serrano (whom she defeated), participated in the first women's boxing match to headline Madison Square Garden, in a bout that was named Fight of the Year by Sports Illustrated.
Illustration of women boxing from The National Police Gazette, 1894, via Wikimedia Commons
by Jennifer Croft
Eight translators arrive at a house in a primeval Polish forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace.
The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime molds and lichens and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets-and deceptions-of Irena Rey's that they are utterly unprepared for. Forced to face their differences as they grow increasingly paranoid in this fever dream of isolation and obsession, soon the translators are tangled up in a web of rivalries and desire, threatening not only their work but the fate of their beloved author herself.
This hilarious, thought-provoking debut novel is a brilliant examination of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language. It is an unforgettable, unputdownable adventure with a small but global cast of characters shaken by the shocks of love, destruction, and creation in one of Europe's last great wildernesses.
Eight translators, each rendering Polish into a different target language. One globally adored, eccentric author, thought to be in line for an "inevitable Nobel Prize." The eccentric author's tall house of "undulating, unscathed oak" stuffed with various aged knickknacks, large enough to accommodate all eight translators as they gather to usher her latest book, believed to be her masterpiece, into their respective tongues. Poland's ancient Białowieża Forest (see Beyond the Book), lurking on the edge of the author's village near Belarus, an intense place crawling with death, life, and fungi.
These frankly grandiose elements make up Jennifer Croft's debut novel The Extinction of Irena Rey. A reader who hasn't seen the Białowieża Forest can easily imagine it to be as stunning as it appears here, but the way the first-person narrator, Spanish-language translator Emilia Martini (aka Emi), introduces eponymous author Irena Rey and the fictional world of literary celebrity she embodies is already a bit much: "Many tried to describe her indescribable aura. Some said it was akin to fine filaments of strummed silver that hovered over her dark cascading hair. Others were reminded of the southern lights, brilliant streaks that hissed across her deep-sky eyes." Luckily for the reader who is already rolling their own eyes, Croft, herself the Booker-winning translator of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, has built a story containing layers of skepticism and wavering reality.
This is partly evident in how it is impossible to refer to the "author" of this "book" without raising the question of whether this means Croft, Irena, Emi, or Alexis Archer, who has the first word in a translator's note, explaining that the following text is a novel written in imperfect Polish by an author whose first language is Spanish (Emi) and then translated into English by Alexis. Alexis is herself the foundation of a character (Irena's English-language translator) in Emi's novel, supposedly based on events they both experienced. Furthermore, Emi considers Alexis a kind of nemesis, and Alexis admits to having taken some liberties to correct the "atmosphere of wrongness" created by Emi's Polish, claiming that every original sentence "becomes a kind of tiny haunted house."
Into this layered linguistic fort springs the story's plot. Shortly after arriving at Irena's, the translators, accustomed to working with their author in a cultish, retreat-style format, notice something is amiss. Irena's husband, Bogdan, appears to have vanished, and Irena is behaving strangely. Soon, she goes missing herself, and the translators are faced with solving the mystery of her disappearance, while also working on their translations and trying to save her beloved Białowieża Forest from increased logging activity.
This story offers several points of metaphorical intersection on themes such as the destruction and creation of writing and translation, the toxic nature of celebrity, and the invisibility of the translator and artist. Croft's novel is genuinely clever in a way that is often delightful. It also, at times, creaks under the weight of its construction. Understanding that there are reasons behind certain strange tediums doesn't keep the prose from sometimes feeling as inscrutable and overwrought as Irena's weird house; one can't help but think that Alexis, who according to Emi believes translation to be a kind of editing, wasn't brutal enough.
Still, the construction holds, and the slow revelation of Emi's humorously flawed character, checked and balanced by footnoted comments from Alexis, is worth the ride. Emi is appalled by Alexis's philosophy, believing that translation should preserve the purity of the author's original intent. She is naive in her ideals but cynical about human relationships, constantly flickering between fickleness and suspicion. She becomes romantically obsessed with Freddie, the Swedish translator, while thinking he may have been having an affair with Irena, is devastated to find he is married, then learns he is in an open marriage, after which she begins having sex with him but thinks he is also sleeping with Alexis, even while knowing that Alexis is not generally interested in men. Emi's views on translation are tied to her insecurities; she makes choices based on her idea of what others find desirable, seeking out competition and conflict at all turns, a trait that eventually culminates in her challenging Alexis to a literal duel.
These characteristics make Emi a perfect acolyte for Irena, as well as something of a reflection of her. Croft's novel is full of playful jokes about the nature of translation and art, but the fire that fuels it is its exploration of power and convenience. It becomes apparent that Irena, who hangs over the plot like a specter, present even in her absence, is using the translators to maintain her own influence. They are also using her, to derive a sense of purpose and significance. But this doesn't make their relationship with her equal, nor does it make it sustainable as it stands. The millennia-old forest, hovering nearby with its ever-present exchanges of birth and demise, serves as a reminder that change is inevitable.
Book reviewed by Elisabeth Cook
In Jennifer Croft's The Extinction of Irena Rey, humans' domestic and professional concerns mix with those of the natural world against the background of the vast Białowieża Forest, beside which the titular author lives and hosts a personal entourage of translators. The Białowieża Forest is a complex of woodland covering 141,885 hectares (almost 550 square miles) across the border between Poland and Belarus. Located on the watershed of the Black Sea and Baltic Sea, it consists of a mix of the remaining parts of several primeval forests. Due to its unique preservation status and biodiversity, it has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. According to the World Wildlife Fund, Białowieża is "the best preserved forest ecosystem and the last low-land deciduous and mixed old-growth forest in Europe."
The Białowieża Forest is home to 59 mammal species, including the world's largest population of free-ranging European Bison, which were extinct in the wild by the early 20th century but reintroduced from captivity in the 1950s. It also houses numerous species of birds and some amphibians and reptiles.
One of the most notable qualities of the forest is its dead wood, which makes up a quarter of the total tree mass in the area due to the land having been left undisturbed. This large amount of decaying trees and plant matter makes Białowieża a place where fungi (3-4,000 species) and invertebrates (over 12,000 species) thrive, many of them in danger of extinction. Croft makes humorous reference to one of these rare species, the Goldstreifiger (Buprestis splendens) beetle, which Emi, Irena's Spanish-language translator, attempts to preserve only for it to be eaten by Quercus, Irena's pet parrot.
Roughly a third of the Polish part of the forest is established as a national park and strictly protected reserves, but the other two-thirds have been subject to increased logging in recent years, an issue raised directly in Croft's novel. In 2016, the Polish Environmental Minister announced plans to triple logging in the Białowieża Forest District, with the reason given that it was necessary to contain a bark beetle outbreak. Environmental groups disagreed with this logic, pointing out that such outbreaks and the dead wood they produced were a natural process that had been taking place in the forest for thousands of years. Emi explains the position of those opposed to the logging: "The forest had always found a way to heal itself, but in order to do so, it had to have biodiversity: a variety of plants, animals, and fungi that only in cooperation with each other were able to perpetuate the cycle of life. No one species could do this on its own; no two or three species could, either."
Following local and worldwide pressure from environmental groups and the media, legal action was taken by the EU Commission in 2017, and Poland was ordered by the European Court of Justice to stop logging in Białowieża until a final ruling was reached. In 2018, the court ruled the increase in logging illegal, as felling trees older than a hundred years broke EU law. However, forestry experts and others have continued to express concerns about subsequent logging and related issues, including the building of a border wall through protected areas of Białowieża ordered by Polish authorities in response to Belarus becoming a destination for refugees, a move that is both hostile to residents and migrants and disrupts the natural movement of wildlife.
In early 2024, Poland's new climate minister pledged to "get saws out of Polish forests," starting with halting planned logging in some of the country's oldest woodland areas. Augustyn Mikos, writing for Climate Home News, urges people to remain conscious of the environmental challenges Poland still faces, while also suggesting that this development is evidence that "concerted civil society pressure really works" and that "Poland's transformation can be a beacon for others: showing how people can successfully mobilise to protect the ecosystems that humanity's survival depends on."
The Białowieża Forest, courtesy of Robert Wielgórski CC BY-SA 3.0
by Francis Spufford
Like his earlier novel Golden Hill, Francis Spufford's Cahokia Jazz inhabits a different version of America, now through the lens of a subtly altered 1920s—a fully imagined world full of fog, cigarette smoke, dubious motives, danger, dark deeds. And in the main character of Joe Barrow, we have a hero of truly epic proportions, a troubled soul to fall in love with as you are swept along by a propulsive and brilliantly twisty plot.
On a snowy night at the end of winter, Barrow and his partner find a body on the roof of a skyscraper. Down below, streetcar bells ring, factory whistles blow, Americans drink in speakeasies and dance to the tempo of modern times. But this is Cahokia, the ancient indigenous city beside the Mississippi living on as a teeming industrial metropolis, filled with people of every race and creed. Among them, peace holds. Just about. But that corpse on the roof will spark a week of drama in which this altered world will spill its secrets and be brought, against a soundtrack of jazz clarinets and wailing streetcars, either to destruction or rebirth.
Here's the big idea of Francis Spufford's Cahokia Jazz: during the Columbian exchange, European colonists, instead of carrying the strain of smallpox that decimated America's Indigenous population, carried a far less virulent strain, Alastrim, that granted immunity upon recovery. A few centuries later, it's 1922, and there remains a visible, mainstream population of Native Americans across the country, marginalized in some places and prosperous in others. Especially prosperous is the ancient city of Cahokia, a hub of industry and culture on the opposite bank of the Mississippi from a tiny town called St. Louis.
The city is majority Indigenous (or takouma in Anopa, Cahokia's lingua franca), with significant populations of Black and white people (taklousa and takata, respectively). Under the watchful eye of the ceremonial-yet-still-formidable takouma monarch, the Man of the Sun, there is something like peace in Cahokia. But the brutal murder of a takata civil servant, staged to look like an Aztec sacrifice, sets off a six-day series of events that pushes the city to its breaking point—and its future may depend upon Joe Barrow, an imposing takouma/taklousa jazz pianist from out of town who works as a homicide detective for the Cahokia police department.
When it comes to alternate history, a compelling scenario only gets you so far. It's impressive to come up with a well-realized setting, one that might have existed had a few metaphorical butterflies not fluttered their wings, but simply describing how this strange new world came to be is not enough: a fascinating history textbook is still a history textbook. What's really impressive is using that setting as a jumping-off point for a cracking great story, the kind of story that turns a bit of bedtime reading into an all-nighter. With Cahokia Jazz, Spufford has done exactly that.
Joe's status as an outsider means he gets exposited to quite often, for the reader's sake as much as his own, but Spufford is careful to explain only what needs explaining. We're told of what's happening elsewhere in America, both good (Reconstruction has been seen through to its conclusion) and bad (there may be a war with Russia over Alaska), but the narrative never loses track of what's really important: the city of Cahokia, its people, and the forces conspiring to tear it apart.
Comparisons to Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, another alternate history detective novel about a marginalized group with a place of its own, immediately spring to mind. But Chabon's Federal District of Sitka was a bleak place, a tract of slushy Alaskan land populated by despairing, fatalistic Jews preparing for the American government to kick them out forever. Cahokia, by contrast, is a thriving 20th-century metropolis, with streetcars and hot jazz and a hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and Spufford writes about it with an eye for evocative detail that feels loving even at the city's dirtiest. He describes the fog off the Mississippi as a "billion billion droplets" that were "breathed by the river into the air"; he details "pent-up normality" resuming in the aftermath of a race riot; he writes about a jazz gig at the Algonkian Hotel with such verve you long to travel across time and space to join in.
If I've been vague about the plot, it's only because I want to make sure you go in without preconceived expectations. Suffice it to say, it's an excellent, meat-and-potatoes noir narrative, replete with corrupt cops, manipulative women, powerful men in limousines, and less powerful men in well over their heads. It's colorful, funny, and exciting, with a cynicism that never quite gives way to nihilism. Cahokia is far from a perfect city, it concludes, but it's better than the alternative–a fact to which many of us, in our own world in the year 2024, would attest.
Book reviewed by Joe Hoeffner
Joe Barrow, the protagonist of Francis Spufford's Cahokia Jazz, does not speak the titular city's common language, Anopa. He learns bits and pieces of it over the course of the novel, at around the same pace as the reader (heeding the suggestion of his friend Alan Jacobs, Spufford does not include a glossary). We learn the words for Native, Black, and white people (takouma, taklousa, and takata); the word for "warrior," which is the preferred title for Cahokia police officers (tastanagi); the word for "chief," in this context referring to the chief of police (miko).
As Spufford explains in the Notes and Acknowledgements at the end of Cahokia Jazz, Anopa became "something like a Swahili for the whole indigenous population at the continent's center" in the world of the novel, a "synthetic, fully formed language." Essentially, Anopa is what might have happened if Mobilian Jargon, once the lingua franca of Indigenous populations along the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, had been able to develop more freely.
While Mobilian Jargon was named after the Indigenous tribe French colonists called the Mobile (near the area now known as Mobile, Alabama), the language was actually largely based on the Chickasaw and Choctaw languages, with various loanwords from other tribes (such as the Algonquin further north) and from French, Spanish, and English traders and colonizers. At its peak, Mobilian Jargon was spoken from Georgia to Eastern Texas, and as far north as Missouri (not far from the location of the real Cahokia, an ancient city that now exists as ruins near St. Louis).
Just as Mobilian Jargon lightly modified words from other Indigenous languages, Anopa lightly modifies Mobilian. "Takouma," the Anopa word for Native Americans, literally means "red man"; in Mobilian, that would be "atak hommá." The same goes for "taklousa" and "atak lusa" ("black man") and "takata" and "atak hata" ("white man"). The Man of the Sun, the ceremonial monarch of Cahokia, is referred to as "Hashi," much like Mobilian's word for the sun, "haši." (The Mobilian word for the moon is also "haši"; perhaps to avoid confusion, the Man of the Sun's niece and heir apparent, the Moon, is known by part of her given name, Couma.)
By 1922 in the novel, Anopa has developed into its own language, one that Spufford describes in the Notes and Acknowledgements as "suitable for…modernist poetry." Unfortunately, Mobilian did not get the chance to evolve so fully; Spufford goes on to say that the last people familiar with the jargon were "elderly Native Americans in Louisiana in the 1980s." It's heartening, then, that Mobilian plays such a central role in a book that crackles with life, allowing it, in some form, to thrive once again.
Cahokia Mounds, all that remains of Cahokia, courtesy of Skubasteve834 CC BY-SA 3.0
by Anne Michaels
1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory as the snow falls—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night.
1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near a different river. He is alive but still not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and tries to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts with messages he cannot understand.
So begins a narrative that spans four generations of connections and consequences that ignite and reignite as the century unfolds. In radiant moments of desire, comprehension, longing, and transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later.
Held is affecting and intensely beautiful, full of mystery, wisdom, and compassion, a novel by a writer at the height of her powers.
"We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?" These words begin Anne Michaels's third novel, Held, a century-spanning meditation on grief, love and human connection. The novel opens in 1917 on the battlefield off the shores of River Escaut in Cambria, France—British soldier John has been wounded in a blast and lies dying. John's inner monologue, a series of observations about his surroundings, gives way to tender memories of his lover, Helena, as he begins to lose consciousness. Love, war and the tension between the two quickly emerge as prominent themes.
The novel then skips ahead to 1920. We're in North Yorkshire, England, and John has miraculously survived, though he's marked by the war in more ways than he realizes. John marries Helena and runs a photography studio, hiring an assistant who can help with the daily upkeep, since John has lost the use of one of his legs in the blast. One day he takes a young man's portrait as usual, but in the background of the photograph, the figure of an older woman materializes—she turns out to be the young man's deceased mother. As John takes more portraits, other shadowy figures begin to come into view, a phenomenon that he is unable to explain or control.
These ghosts continue to permeate John's photographs as well as Anne Michaels's deftly-crafted novel, which weaves together the narratives of multiple families across twentieth and twenty-first century Europe. John's narrative segues to Helena's, and then their daughter's, before introducing more tangentially connected characters, including several real-life figures such as Marie Curie and Hertha Ayrton (see Beyond the Book). The novel loops backward and forward in time, giving the impression of the past and future unfolding simultaneously, and finally culminates in a short scene on the Gulf of Finland in 2025.
This chorus of narratives at times confounds (connections between characters are not always evident at first glance) but ultimately rewards the reader as it dovetails into a poignant, singular work that ruminates on the ways in which we touch one another's lives. A small detail in 1980 will echo back to 1920; two characters will brush against one another by chance and alter the course of their family history. The motif of John's ghostly photographs is a literal manifestation of one of the novel's most central themes: that the dead never leave us—that we coexist with the echoes and shadows of our ancestors in our daily lives, even if we can't feel them.
Anne Michaels, once Toronto's poet laureate, employs a nontraditional narrative structure and tells this story in accomplished prose that engages the reader effortlessly; it's difficult not to inhale this strange, lovely novel in a single sitting. At a slim 200 pages, Held appears to be an ambitious project with its numerous locations and large cast of characters, but Michaels rises to the challenge she has set herself—everything is deliberate and nothing is underdeveloped. Though each reader is bound to take away something different from this thematically rich work, the compassion and tenderness it has for its characters and their complicated relationships feels like its most profound gift.
Book reviewed by Rachel Hullett
The friendship between Hertha Ayrton and Marie Curie is explored in Anne Michaels's multigenerational novel Held. Although Marie Curie is a household name, Aryton's fascinating life is likely unfamiliar to most readers.
Born in 1854 in Portsea, England, Hertha Ayrton was born as Phoebe Sarah Marks. Levi Marks, a clockmaker from Poland, had been forced to flee to England to escape anti-Semitic persecution. When he died in 1861, leaving his family in a significant amount of debt, his wife, seamstress Alice Theresa Marks, did her best to raise Phoebe Sarah, who at the time went by Sarah, and her six siblings (soon to be seven), but struggled under the pressure. At nine years old, Sarah went to live with Marion Hartog, her mother's sister, who raised and educated her alongside her own children.
As a teenager, Sarah adopted the name Hertha. The reasoning behind "Hertha" is unclear—some sources claim her name is derived from the earth goddess described in Algernon Swinburne's 1869 poem "Hertha," and others claim she named herself after the protagonist of Swedish writer Frederika Bremer's novel Hertha. It was at this time, in her teenage years under the tutelage of her aunt, that Hertha first discovered her passion for math and science.
In 1874, Hertha enrolled in Cambridge's Girton College, the first college for women in England, and studied mathematics. During this time she befriended George Eliot, who may have based the character Mirah Cohen in her 1876 novel Daniel Deronda on Hertha.
Although women were not eligible to graduate with a degree at the time, Hertha completed her studies at Girton College and went on to teach mathematics at a girls' school while pursuing her own research. In 1884, Hertha patented the line-divider, an instrument used in engineering and architecture for dividing a line into any number of equal parts. She would later go on to patent 25 more inventions in her lifetime.
Also in 1884, Hertha began studying at Finsbury Technical College, attending classes given by professor William Ayrton, a pioneer in electrical engineering, whom she went on to marry. She became the stepmother to Aryton's daughter, and a year later gave birth to her own daughter. Hertha assisted her husband with his research, which is when she made a significant discovery about electric arcs, about which she wrote several articles that went on to be published in the scientific journal The Electrician. She was the first woman to be elected as a member to the Institution of Electrical Engineers, as well as the first woman to be proposed to the fellowship of the Royal Society, though she was refused as the committee did not allow the admission of married women members.
William Ayrton died in 1908, but Hertha did not spend the later years of her life alone. She was an active member of her community, making many friends, one of whom was scientist Marie Curie. An active supporter of women's rights and women's suffrage, Hertha was one of Marie Curie's biggest champions. When Marie's discovery of radium was attributed to her husband, Pierre Curie, Hertha led a press campaign advocating for Marie to receive the proper attribution, stating, "errors are notoriously hard to kill, but an error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat."
During World War I, Hertha developed a hand-operated fan to get rid of mustard gas that was used in trenches. Though her invention was initially dismissed by the War Office, 104,000 "Ayrton Fans" would eventually be delivered to soldiers on the western front. She devoted the final years of her career to researching how to clear noxious vapors from mines and sewers. Hertha died of septicemia in 1923.
Hertha Ayrton stands in her home laboratory, where she conducted all her experiments, courtesy of Jewish Women's Archive
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