Tag: International Women’s Day
International Women’s Day 2022
Today, 8 March, 2022 is International Women’s Day, and I’m therefore going to take the opportunity to reflect a little, both on the women writers and readers we find in our borrowing records, as I did last year and also on those we don’t see – the wives, daughters, mothers, sisters, cousins, nieces, friends, and […]
Women Borrowers at Westerkirk Library
To mark Women’s History Month, we’re running a series of blogs to highlight the women who wrote and borrowed the books found in our libraries. Today, I’m returning to Westerkirk Library in Dumfriesshire, where a small but active cohort of women members made over 250 borrowings between 1813 and 1818. Eight of the 120 borrowers […]
Seeking the Sublime: Elizabeth Montagu in Scotland, August 1766
Cuchullin sat by Tura’s wall; by the tree of the rustling leaf.—His spear leaned against the mossy rock. His shield lay by him on the grass. As he thought of mighty Carbar a hero whom he slew in war; the scout of the ocean came, Moran the son of Fithil. – Fingal, Book I Elizabeth […]
Women Borrowers
Today is International Women’s Day, and so I have been reflecting on the women in our records. I thought I would begin with a famous passage from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, in which the speaker is barred from entering a library in one of the ‘Oxbridge’ colleges: [H]ere I was actually at […]