An 18th century bright spark who let her mighty pen do the talking

The great thing about the days on which Christmas and New Year happened, this time around, was the way it provided a week-long holiday.

So readers gained a good chunk of time in which to address fictional goings on, or slide briefly into the lives of others, like Brian O’Driscoll and Ivan Yates. This year’s crop of autobiographies was particularly good, but not one of them, bestsellers or not, can compare with the three-volume job turned out by Laetitia Pilkington, an 18th century bright spark.

If you haven’t heard of her, your loss is attributable to the fact that history tends to focus on monarchs, soldiers, politicians, aldermen and villains, leaving women in the drawing room.