Jennifer Homans published Apollo’s Angels in 2010, a history of classical ballet that she had been working on for ten years. It is an epic work, tracing four centuries and spanning different countries, setting the evolution of the form in the many political, philosophical, and aesthetic contexts that shaped it.
Jessica Mitford was born in 1917, one of the six renowned Mitford sisters from an aristocratic English famil, and would go on to become the “queen of the muckrakers.”
A former teacher and scriptwriter, Julienne Aisner was running a Paris film company when the Nazis occupied France. The 43-year-old Aisner was recruited in January 1943 by an SOE officer to rent apartments for arriving SOE agents, welcome them to Paris and provide them with false documents—identity cards, ration cards, and work permits—that she obtained.
Owner, board chair and publisher of The Washington Post for decades
Playwright Eve Ensler, who would later go by V, debuted her ground-breaking The Vagina Monologues in 1996.
“Hannah Gadsby has been a comedian for more than a decade but it was 2018 when the world took notice when their groundbreaking comedy special launched on Netflix and stopped the comedy world in its tracks.”
Gisèle Pelicot was in her late 60s when police revealed that her husband of 50 years had been drugging, raping, and allowing other men to rape her for almost a decade. By declining the option of a closed-door trial with full anonymity and no media, she ensured that the dozens of men who assaulted her would have to face the public, at the cost that she would as well.
Edwina Brocklesby, who would go on to be the U.K.’s oldest Ironman triathlete and founder and director of Silverfit, which promotes physical activity among older people, “didn’t do any exercise at all until I was 50.”
American writer and activist for peace, human rights, and related causes.
“When I won the Booker Prize in 2019 for my novel Girl, Woman, Other, I became an ‘overnight success’ – after forty years working professionally in the arts.”