SCOTT, Eleanor.

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Adventurous Women. First edition, first impression. Best-known now for her acclaimed collection of ghost stories Randall's Round (1929), it was her popular histories of women, drawing on her experiences as a schoolteacher, that were "her greatest successes with the public" (Aigner, p. 341). The illustrated dust jacket is scarce in any condition.Eleanor Scott (1892-1965) was born Helen Madeline Leys and published under the pennames of Scott and Peter Redcliffe Shore. After graduating from Somerville College, Oxford, Scott became a teacher and wrote Adventurous Women and Heroic Women (1939) to fill what she saw a gap in the market for inspirational books aimed at young women. This collection relays the stories of Queen Matilda, Joan of Arc, Mary Queen of Scots, Anita Garibaldi, and Gertrude Bell, amongst others.Scott's "shrewd and uncanny" grasp of the emotional lives of women in her fiction led to her description in contemporary reviews "as an understanding writer of the feminine psychology" (The Denton Lass O, 9 October 1930). She was acclaimed by respected supernatural fiction editor Richard Dalby as "one of the best, but ultimately least known, writers" of this era (Dalby, p. 169).

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