Frances Borzello is firmly on the side of women, art, and, luckily for us, readers. As editor with A L Rees of The New Art History, she has a firm hold on available art scholarship but adds to this a joyous, assured conversational style. Thus she starts:

I want to state that the situation of a woman working in a profession that was not of her making was unfair from beginning to end. If she was not ignored or patronised she existed as a sort of female Rorschach blot on which those around her – mostly male, but female, too – projected their thoughts, arguments, fears and prejudices.

Then, as a generous and inclusive writer, Borzello goes on to point out that ‘by concentrating on the unfairness, only one side of women’s experience comes into view’. Quite so. This refreshingly optimistic book then takes off on a heartening tour of how the other side worked. She shows us