play The Mousetrap is the longest-running play of all time with more than 24,000 performances since 1952.
When in 1926 Christie’s first husband asked for a divorce, she disappeared and, after a nationwide search, was found eleven days later. She never gave any account of her disappearance. Some speculated that (like Charles Ashby) she wanted the police to think her spouse had killed her. She later married Max Mallowan, an archaeologist, and remained happy with him until her death.
Kitchen
George Eliot (1819–1880)
Mary Anne Evans took the male pseudonym to publish all of her seven novels, the most famous being Middlemarch (1871–72), Silas Marner (1861), Daniel Deronda (1876) and The Mill on the Floss (1860).
She lived with George Henry Lewes for more than twenty years, referring to him as her husband and calling herself Marian Evans Lewes, even though, because Lewes was already married, they never wed. At the end of her life, after Lewes died in 1878, she married John Cross, a man twenty years her junior. Queen Victoria was a devoted reader of Eliot’s novels and admired Adam Bede (1859) so much that she commissioned an artist to paint scenes from the book. Virginia Woolf was also an admirer of Eliot’s work, calling her “the pride and paragon of all her sex” and writing that Middlemarch was a “magnificent book which, with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.”
Dora Carrington (1893–1932)
Dora de Houghton Carrington was a British painter who painted portraits of E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey and other well-known figures of her day. She was not a member of the Bloomsbury Group but closely connected with it through her relationship with Strachey, a homosexual writer with whom she lived, along with another man, for a time. Carrington was also bisexual. Virginia Woolf wrote of Carrington that she was “an odd mixture of impulse and self-consciousness . . . so eager to please, conciliatory, restless and active . . . so red and solid, and at the same time inquisitive, that one can’t help liking her.”
Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962)
The Honorable Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, but known as Vita. Her parents shared their surname, being cousins. Sackville-West was a writer and a poet, most famous for her novel The Edwardians. She and her husband Harold Nicolson had an open marriage and Sackville-West had affairs with several women, including Virginia Woolf.* Her greatest love affair was with Violet Trefusis (daughter of the mistress of King Edward VII), whom she met when she was twelve years old.
Mary Somerville (1780–1872)
Mary wasn’t formally educated but spent her childhood reading books. When she discovered mathematics she studied so hard her parents worried for her health. Unlike her first husband, Mary’s second husband encouraged her learning and love of math and science, so she began publishing papers to great acclaim. In 1835 Mary Somerville and Caroline Herschel became the first women to be elected honorary fellows of the Royal Astronomical Society. Mary was the first person to sign John Stuart Mill’s petition for women’s suffrage. Somerville College, Oxford, was founded in 1879 and named in her honor. It was the second college to be established solely for female students, after Lady Margaret Hall in 1878. Mary was friend and teacher to Ada Lovelace (daughter of Byron), a mathematician in her own right, whose discoveries assisted the invention of computers. Before she died Mary was awarded the Victoria Medal by the Royal Geographical Society.
Caroline Herschel (1750–1848)
Born in Hannover, Germany, Caroline lived to be ninety-seven. During her long and illustrious life she made her mark in the field of astronomy, discovering eight comets at a time when fewer than thirty were known. In 1828 the Royal Astronomical Society awarded her its gold medal, an honor it wouldn’t bestow again on a woman until 1996. Together with Mary Somerville, Caroline was elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1835, though the society wouldn’t actually allow female members until 1916. Caroline worked with her brother (William Herschel, who discovered Uranus in 1781) throughout his life and continued alone after his death. Just before she died, the King of Prussia bestowed upon her the Gold Medal for Science in recognition of her great contributions to the subject.
Downstairs Hallway
Florence Nightingale (1820–1910)
Florence Nightingale was born into an upper-class British family that opposed her desire to take up nursing. But inspired, she said, by a call from God in 1837, Nightingale was determined to flout the social mores of her milieu and rejected marriage* to the politician