Female Warriors. Memorials of Female Valour and Heroism, from the Mythological Ages to the Present Era.

Two Octavo volumes. Publisher's original cloth, bright gilt-stamped spines dispalying some staining to the covers and spines. A FIRST EDITION of this cross-cultural history of women at war, with truly global coverage, the heroines hailing from regions as diverse as the Amazon, Arabia, Ethiopia, India, and Ireland, and the conflicts including the Crusades, the Thirty Years' War, and the revolutions of France, Greece, and America. In her introduction, the Irish writer and artist Clayton (1834-1900) lampoons how "Popular Prejudice, having decided that woman is a poor, weak creature, credulous, easily influenced, holds that she is of necessity timid... Popular Prejudice abhors hard facts, and rarely reads history... Walking down the serried ranks of history, we find strange records of feminine bravery; as we might discover singular instances of masculine cowardice, if we searched far enough" (pp. 3-4). Clayton studied art at the National Gallery and the British Museum and worked as an illustrator for the satirical magazine Judy. She also illustrated many of her own histories, novels, and children's stories that centred women, such as Women of the Reformation (1861), English Female Artists (1876), and Only a Girl and Other Tales (1883). Uncommon in the publisher's cloth. Both volumes are now mylar protected.