For 57 years, a woman audiences knew as Mabel Stark walked into steel cages packed with tigers, wrestled her favourite among them to the ground in front of paying crowds, and survived at least 18 separate maulings along the way. She's usually remembered as the first woman to make a career out of training tigers, in an era when most circuses wouldn't let a woman near the cats at all. Her real name wasn't even Mabel Stark. A Rough Start in Kentucky She was born Mary Ann Haynie

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

A Kansas farm girl from a strict Catholic family ran off to join a traveling carnival in 1916, taught herself to ride a motorcycle sideways around a vertical wooden wall at full throttle, and spent the next couple of decades billed as the world's foremost woman motorcycle stunt rider. That part of Lillian La France's story shows up on plenty of vintage photo blogs. What most of them leave out is what happened to her memory decades later, when an experimental filmmaker tracked