Eleanor Morton’s astute comedy sends up both contemporary and historical concerns. She can delicately dissect as if separating flesh from bone, with a fish fork and knife in hands begloved with silk, and also absolutely smash to bits, as if with a slick meat cleaver gripped in fists – whichever the occasion calls for. She is adept at both.
She has several stand-up shows under her belt, has supported the likes of Josie Long and Frankie Boyle, writes for TV, and you’ve likely seen her sketches as the eerily familiar Craig the Tour Guide, dour and exasperated. Now, she uses her sharp observations to tell the stories of several significant women from the past. She sat down with SNACK to tell us about her new book, Life Lessons From Historical Women.
You blend together the historical with the modern beautifully, making parallels between what happened then with what is happening now, in the book, and in your comedy sketches. Which of the historical women in your book would have done the most damage or most good with a smartphone?
Hmm, that’s a good question – I think Mary, Queen of Scots should have been kept away from dating apps. She has bad form there. I think Mary Seacole would have really utilised social media to raise funds for her Crimea efforts; she was very savvy about that kind of thing. And I think the Match Girls would have gained a lot of support on places like Instagram – I can picture them taking lots of photos!
If you could invite any three from your book to a wee boozy brunch, who would you invite and why?
I think, no question, Josephine Baker: she was so fun and charming. It would be a guaranteed good time, and she would have hundreds of anecdotes about her time as a spy, her life in Paris, her movie career. I would love to hear Ada Lovelace talk about computing and her ideas for the future – I think she had the potential to do so much more, but her early death robbed us of her innovation.
How was the process of writing a book versus writing comedy?
When you’re writing stand-up you’re not necessarily writing everything down; it’s all quite malleable and temporary. It felt good (and a bit scary) to put stuff down permanently on the page. But I also really enjoyed the chance to stretch my writing legs a bit and have breathing space for my thoughts and ideas. It was quite refreshing not to have to make sure every sentence had a punchline.
Tell me more about your perspective on the erasure of women in history and what it was like choosing and researching women for this book.
As most historians of women will tell you, the vast majority of women in history leave no tangible record of their lives, for several reasons: they usually couldn’t write, or didn’t have the time, and they were simply not deemed important enough to be remembered.
For lots of women in history, including ones in this book like Mary Bryant and Artemisia Gentileschi, we only have records of their lives because of the ways they interacted with men – in their cases, criminal trials, but also things like wills, marriage certificates etc. Official documents are still the best resource on so many women in history, but of course they don’t tell us much about what those women were really like as people.
Other cases, like the Match Women, as the brilliant historian Louise Raw is at pains to point out, had a huge impact on their community but were actively ignored or diminished by journalists reporting on their cases. That’s why, when you compare them to the striking dockers of 1889, there are barely any photos or articles about the women themselves.
The final reason it’s tricky is because some women, like drag artist Stormé DeLarverie, purposefully concealed or erased details about their own lives, for whatever personal reasons they had. So it was very difficult, but I also enjoyed the challenge.
Any final thoughts for our readers?
The most enjoyable thing about this book was getting to hear other stories from readers and friends who have their own historical women they’re interested in. It just goes to show what an impact women really do leave on the world, despite official attempts to erase them.
And I’d like to add that a few people have told me that they will ‘get a copy for their wives’, so this is your PSA: men can read the book too! In fact, I think men ought to read it more than women! We need to get over the idea that women’s history is ‘women’s’ history – it’s human history!
Eleanor Morton’s Life Lessons From Historical Women is out now, published by Octopus Books. Available here.
