Why subscribe?

Are you interested in the European nineteenth century, when revolution, war, colonialism, radical ideas and rapid social change changed not just the continent then but also our twentieth and even twenty-first century worlds?

Are you a circus history nerd or are you just beginning to find out about the days when a circus was as essential to a European city as a railway station or town hall?

Are you interested in the ways in which humans and horse lives have intertwined through history?

Maybe, like me, you’re hooked on the stories of the women I write about, whose lives were glamorous and nomadic but involved tremendous physical risk and discipline – women like Jenny de Rahden, who performed while dealing with a stalker, an abusive husband and a financially incorrigible father, or Zephora Furr, who crisscrossed Europe with her daughter as a widow, doggedly performing for the money and sheer adrenalin.

Whatever brings you here, join us in a community of people fascinated by women’s history and the nineteenth-century circus.

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Viral photographs of an enigmatic Belle Epoque horsewoman set me hunting through archives and circuses from St Petersburg to Paris to uncover the lives of women who were artistes, survivors, and scapegoats of the nineteenth century.

People

Susanna Forrest

@susannaforrest

I started out working in erotica in London, and somehow it led to chasing wild horses in Mongolia, getting spooked in St Petersburg, living in Berlin for 15 years, moving to Sweden, and hunting for daredevil women of the 1800s.