Prologue

Such is Eliza Orme’s identity—a woman academically trained in law at a time when the discipline’s professional credentials were categorically closed to women—that she was quite well known in her own time and place, late-Victorian London, but has been largely overlooked by posterity despite our ongoing fascination with women’s struggle for equal rights. Miss Orme was ‘hopelessly practical’, as she once told a political audience, but she was also remarkably ambitious. Research in private letters and published accounts reveals her as sarcastic and witty, warm and teasing, blunt and authoritative. Historian Leslie Howsam chooses the genre of ‘research memoir’ to capture key elements of this elusive subject’s life and work while demonstrating how digital resources and methods, increasingly available over four decades of her own career, have transformed the investigation.