Sipping tea in a glittering London drawing room, a circle of women discuss theatre, philosophy and the classics, competing to outdo each other in wit and brilliance. Later, one of these women lies on the floor of her husband's brewhouse, blood seeping through her skirts as she miscarries her child. Hester Thrale's husband had ignored her repeated pleas to take her home until his business there was finished. In Bluestockings, Susannah Gibson charts the struggles and immense achievements of a group of trailblazing women who risked their reputations to become public intellectuals. Burdened with ailing children and unsympathetic husbands, enduring the sneers of contemporaries who thought books frazzled women's brains and damaged their wombs, they read, wrote and published their work. Copies of Hannah More's poems were requested by King George III, Elizabeth Montagu's rebuttal to Voltaire's critique of Shakespeare thoroughly rattled the great Frenchman, and Catherine Macaulay's histories were so acclaimed in America that on her visit there she was hosted by George Washington. Earning money, fame, and a modicum of power, the Bluestockings laid essential foundations for future feminists to build upon. Bluestockings tells the fascinating, devastating, forgotten stories of these heroines of Britain's very first women's movement.

Cambridge is now world-famous as a centre of science, but it wasn't always so. Before the nineteenth century, the sciences were of little importance in the University of Cambridge. But that began to change in 1819 when two young Cambridge fellows took a geological fieldtrip to the Isle of Wight. Adam Sedgwick and John Stevens Henslow spent their days there exploring, unearthing dazzling fossils, dreaming up elaborate theories about the formation of the earth, and bemoaning the lack of serious science in their ancient university. As they threw themselves into the exciting new science of geology - conjuring millions of years of history from the evidence they found in the island's rocks - they also began to dream of a new scientific society for Cambridge. This society would bring together like-minded young men who wished to learn of the latest science from overseas, and would encourage original research in Cambridge. It would be, they wrote, a society "to keep alive the spirit of inquiry". Their vision was realised when they founded the Cambridge Philosophical Society later that same year. Its founders could not have imagined the impact the Cambridge Philosophical Society would have: it was responsible for the first publication of Charles Darwin's scientific writings, and hosted some of the most heated debates about evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century; it saw the first announcement of x-ray diffraction by a young Lawrence Bragg - a technique that would revolutionise the physical, chemical and life sciences; it published the first paper by C.T.R. Wilson on his cloud chamber - a device that opened up a previously-unimaginable world of sub-atomic particles. 200 years on from the Society's foundation, this book reflects on the achievements of Sedgwick, Henslow, their peers, and their successors. Susannah Gibson explains how Cambridge moved from what Sedgwick saw as a "death-like stagnation" (really little more than a provincial training school for Church of England clergy) to being a world-leader in the sciences. And she shows how science, once a peripheral activity undertaken for interest by a small number of wealthy gentlemen, has transformed into an enormously well-funded activity that can affect every aspect of our lives.