Undreamed shores - Frances Larson

In the first decades of the 20th century, five women - Katherine Routledge, Maria Czaplicka, Winifred Blackman, Beatrice Blackwood and Barbara Freire-Marreco - arrived at Oxford to take the newly created Masters in Anthropology. Though their circumstances differed radically, all were intent on visiting and studying remote communities a world away from their own. Through their work, they resisted the prejudices of the male establishment, proving that women could be explorers and scientists, too. In the wastes of Siberia; in the villages and pueblos of the Nile and New Mexico; on Easter Island; and in the uncharted interior of New Guinea, they found new freedoms - yet when they returned to England, loss, madness and self-doubt awaited them.Frances Larson's masterful group biography is a revelatory portrait of five hidden heroines of British scholarship.

Dr Frances Larson is an honorary research fellow in anthropology at Durham University. She is the author of a biography of Henry Wellcome, An Infinity of Things (OUP, 2009), which was part-funded by a Wingate Scholarship. The book was published to considerable critical acclaim and was subsequently shortlisted for the MJA Awards and chosen as a Sunday Times Book of The Year, as well as a New Scientist Best Book of 2009. She is also the co-author of Knowing Things (OUP, 2007), a book on the history of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, where she worked as a researcher after receiving her D.Phil.