The Book of Falling Women

Lives Turned Upside Down

What does it mean to fall? To feel fragile, vulnerable, exposed? To find a way – if you can – of getting up, and beginning again?

In January 2020, scholar and literary historian Daisy Hay fell and hit her head. For over a year afterwards she moved through the world in a state of persistent wrongness. The ground refused to stay still, and to be perpendicular became a difficult thing.

As she gradually righted herself, she began to see falling everywhere, but particularly among the women of the turbulent late eighteenth century: the period in which she had always felt most at home. It was there in Jane Austen, in whose novels young women fall spectacularly. It was there in the actress Sarah Siddons, whose tragic swoons made her the sensation of the London stage. Above all it was there in the autobiographical writing of Hester Thrale, who reclaimed the act of falling as she wrote its story anew. This was a period when a great many brilliant women fell (and felt) differently. They fell when they could not speak. They fell in and out of love. They fell onto the pages of history, and sometimes they flagrantly fell out.

These women made art at the cusp of modernity. A highly original cultural history, The Book of Falling Women explores their stories alongside a memoir of a life turned upside down.

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