Freya Johnston

Oct 9, 2023 | oll.libertyfund.org | Freya Johnston

The most celebrated episode in Livy’s History of Rome is the rape of Lucrece by Tarquin, son of the Roman king. That crime leads first to his expulsion and then to the foundation of the Roman republic. Shakespeare’s version of a story that is at once painfully intimate and a public spectacle has Lucrece demonstrate political insight and an extraordinarily sympathetic imagination—both of which serve, in the end, not to save her, but to enforce the necessity of her suicide.

May 24, 2023 | lrb.co.uk | Carolyn Dever |Freya Johnston

There​ is no entry for Michael Field in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The search function directs you first to ‘Bradley, Katharine Harris’ and then to ‘Cooper, Edith Emma’. Click on the second name, however, and you aren’t taken to a biography of Cooper but back to her aunt, Bradley. These convoluted preliminaries seem appropriate for two women whose identities were entangled in various forms of aspiration, impersonation, interdependence and disguise.