Monuments and Maidens

"Yes, and my last two choices make an interesting pair for me, because they’re both about culture, symbolism and language. And I think Marina Warner’s work is phenomenally interesting. It’s the kind of history I could never write, so I love pouring myself into it. What’s so interesting is the way in which, in our culture, female figures become a vessel for abstract ideas. It’s interesting, too, that Antonia Fraser’s book has that word in its title. So the figures of justice, victory and liberty, for example, are all female. And Marina Warner comments in her conclusion that, “Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is.” In other words, the difficulty for women is agency; it’s doing something and being an actor in the narrative. Being an abstract embodiment is what women can do much more easily in our culture, which is why I think having queens now works quite well – because monarchs are required to be , rather than to do . But if you go back to the 16th century, monarchs had to rule – and that was where it became much more difficult for women to take that role."