Marie’s Reviews > The Edinburgh Seven > Status Update

In these last few chapters there has been more information but frustratingly not as much as I would like.

For a book about feminist women (so I’m told, I’m a little unclear on the evidence to support this) James Young Simpson had a longer passage than two of the women on which this book is supposed to be about.

I feel like a horse being lead to dry pond. I keep reading and get these snipers of fascinating information and then receive no more information. The paragraph about women being there husbands property was informative but came out of nowhere narratively.

I am starting to think that this is the information to draw me into the story because Mary Anderson got a single page and that is not enough information who died in her 70s

I am really starting to hope for more detail in this book after the initial biographies are done. Helen sounds fascinating in her own right and then we find out her second husband is super important but in the next paragraph he is dead.

Okay chapter four on Edith made me so mad. She is by far the most interesting (to me) thus far in part because of “The Hope Affair” and being the youngest but there is almost no expansion on information in this section!

Chapter 3 suffered much of the same problems I found in chapter 2. To use a law term there was an assertion of facts not in evidence. There were several places in this chapter where the author presented a fact that I felt had not been well established in the text. Also it feels a bit like we are comparing the seven to each other in a weird competition and I don’t like that. Sophia the hothead and Isabel the saint.

The facts presented in chapter two about Sophia Jex Blake were interesting but there was not enough fleshing out of these facts. The author seems to argue that Sophia was an insufferable nag but doesn’t present any other evidence other than she was persistent. Then there is a death in her family and she was upset but she had spent an unknown number of years traveling, find to learn and be from family. Confusing

The first chapter failed to grab me.

Personally there were also a few too many explanation points.