Best-selling author Kate Mosse salutes heroic women in live Derbyshire show

Kate’s show Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World will be hosted at Buxton Opera House on March 28, 2023.

Based on the international best-selling author’s book of the same name, the show will see Kate celebrate the lives of extraordinary, brilliant, trail-blazing and heroic women from throughout history whose names deserve to be better known.

It’s part detective story into her own, sometimes heart-breaking, family history as she’ll share how she tracked down her own long-forgotten relative, Lily Watson, in whose literary shadow she is walking, part fanfare to the incredible women in whose footsteps we all walk and part love letter about how history is made and who gets to make it.

Kate will shine a spotlight on fascinating and often overlooked, or ignored, facts about the women who made history, from every corner of the world and in every period of time.

Did you know that:

When the Lionesses played to a record crowd at the Euros at Wembley in July 2022, they were walking in the footsteps of the legendary Merseyside footballer, Lily Parr, who scored nearly one thousand goals in a career lasting from 1919 to 1952 before hanging up her boots?

Scientist and inventor Eunice Newton Foote was the first to understand the phenomenon of global warming, though her work was accredited to the male scientists who came after her?

The first dishwasher was invented by an American woman – Josephine Cochrane – in Chicago and patented in 1893?

Keira Knightley’s character in The Pirates of the Caribbean, was inspired by notorious ‘she-captain’ female pirates of the 18th century, Anne Bonny and Mary Read?

Over the course of the evening, Kate will feature a joyous and diverse cast of characters, some unknown and some legendary: from the world’s first named author, Enheduanna, to the world’s bestselling author, Agatha Christie; from Joan of Arc to the heroine of the Greek War of Independence, Laskarina Bouboulina; from freedom riders Rosa Parks and Pauli Murray to Victorian explorer Isabella Bird; from Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole to Elizabeth Garrett Anderson to the Edinburgh Seven.

Each night the audience will meet the ‘mothers of invention’ and ‘pirate queens’; unsung pioneers of medicine and women’s rights, those who dazzled on the screen, the stage and in the sports stadium; those fought for what they believed and those who reached for the stars, and the female scientists whose work was overlooked or misattributed.

Kate said: “My hope is that Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries will inspire as I have been inspired. It’s a love letter to history and about how, without knowing where we come from – truthfully and entirely - we cannot know who we are.”

The Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries tour will surprise, amaze, challenge and perhaps even encourage some in the audience to undertake a little family history of their own as it travels the world and through time: 23rd century Sumeria BCE to 19th century Japan, Revolutionary France to Germany in the 1940s, South Africa and New Zealand, Russia to China, Antarctica to South America, 15th century Ireland to 21st century Britain.

Tickets cost £30; go to www.buxtonoperahouse.org.uk