Women Making History in the Early Twentieth Century: Working for the VCH ‘Big Red Books’

Who made history in the early twentieth century? The Victoria County History’s ‘Big Red Books’ are a testament to the grand ambitions of the project’s founders. Many hands went into the production of the books, from researchers and writers to indexers and illustrators. And among them were well over a hundred women whose work in all these fields of knowledge production made it possible. Between 2021 and 2024, the team behind the AHRC-funded project “Beyond Notability: Re-Evaluating Women’s Work in Archaeology, History and Heritage in British 1870-1950” searched through the archives of a range of institutions looking for women active in these fields. One of the main outputs of this work was an open-access database containing the names of over 900 women by the end of the project. A portion of these women were employed, in various capacities, by the Victoria County History. This talk will explore some of the evidence found in the VCH archive and in other institutional archives for the work and lives of VCH women. It will highlight not just the those researching and writing text for the VCH, but also those involved in other areas of the production of the iconic Red Books.


Dr Amara Thornton was Co-Investigator of the Beyond Notability project. She is a historian of archaeology and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and is currently a Non Stipendiary Research Fellow at the Institute of Classical Studies. She is co-editor (with Dr Katy Soar) of Strange Relics: Stories of Archaeology and the Supernatural 1895-1954 (Handheld Press, 2022) and author of Archaeologists in Print: Publishing for the People (UCL Press, 2018).


This lecture is part of the Victoria County History celebrations of its 250th ‘Big Red Book’, to be published in 2025.