The book was part of Mundell’s “Heroine’s Library”.
No preface
From chapter I: “A Band of Heroines” [7-19]
[7] In the long list of shining names which occur to us when we hear the phrase “makers of history,” some of the brightest are those of women. But, for the most part, their contribution has been indirect rather than direct, and their influence has been exerted through other and stronger actors on the world’s great stage. Here and there, however, from the earliest times down to our own day, women have stood forth to do public service which others shrank from doing, or for which they alone were specially qualified. The [8] claims of pity, the passion of indignation, the enthusiasm for home and fatherland, each in turn has sufficed to overrule the natural instinct which makes the sex shrink from the horrors of the battlefield, the privations of the siege, or the unknown risks of some desperate enterprise. Hence the examples, infinite in number and variety, of courage, daring, and endurance; hence the instances of ready wit and resourceful ingenuity, which we are all so prompt to admire and wonder at, but which in so many cases have been lost to history for lack of a chronicler. In the following pages the selection made has had in view the motive which prompted the act, quite as much as the heroism and hardihood with which it was accomplished.
Contents
I. A Band of Heroines 7II. Warrior Queens 20
III. The Heroine of Brittany 27
IV. The Heroine of Dunbar 35
V. Joan of Arc 39
VI. A Devoted Wife 53
VII. Catherine Douglas 62
VIII. The Defender of Corfe Castle 72
IX. The Defender of Latham House 79
X. Lady Russell 86
XI. A Great Sacrifice 95
XII. A Daughter’s Devotion 107
XIII. After ‘The Fifteen’ 115
XIV. The Heroine of the ‘Forty-Five’ 127
XV. Margret, Lady Ogilvy 138
XVI. In Hostile Hands 145
XVII. In the Mutiny 154