On August 24, 1847, a parcel went out from Keighley railway station in Yorkshire, bound for a publisher's office in London. Inside was a handwritten manuscript running to hundreds of pages, sent by a writer using a name that wasn't really hers, from a family address that wasn't disclosed, on the back of a novel that had already been rejected more times than anyone was keeping count of. Six weeks later it was a bestseller. The writer was Charlotte Brontë, the book was Jane Eyr

Most people who've heard of Radclyffe Hall know exactly one fact about her: she wrote The Well of Loneliness, and the British government banned it for being obscene. That trial is real, and it mattered. But it was actually the second time in Hall's life that a court was asked to decide whether she was, in the words used both times, "a grossly immoral woman." The first case came eight years earlier, grew out of her secret hobby investigating psychics, and has been almost entir

Adolf Hitler once sent Margery Booth 200 red roses wrapped in a sash printed with a swastika. He'd just watched her sing at Bayreuth and told her she was perfectly charming. What he didn't know was that the same woman was smuggling British intelligence out of Nazi Germany hidden in her underwear, hiding a Jewish woman in her Berlin flat, and burying stolen documents in the grounds of a royal palace. She got away with it for years, moving through Hitler's inner circle as one o