Presence

Impassioned and deeply thoughtful, Presence taps into the feelings, desires and fears of women in the past. It left me pondering my own physical experiences. Illuminating and brave.

Alison Light, author of Common People

In Presence, Erin Maglaque does something radical, not only dissolving the obsolete Cartesian divide – which insists on separating thoughts and feelings – but daring to honour her own bodily truths as worthy of record. An important, original contribution to modern feminist writing about the body.

Gabriel Weston, author of Alive

Engrossing and vital, Presence rediscovers the female body as a vessel of history. Interweaving past and present, the personal with incisive scholarship, these stories reveal the rich, unexpected, and sometimes brutal ways in which the complexities of female embodiment connect all women across all time.

Michelle Orange, author of Pure Flame

An immersive, revelatory, and astonishing book about women, told through the distinct bodily experiences that punctuate our lives, and the history we’ve rarely been taught. Beautifully written and acutely insightful, Presence connects us to ourselves, our foremothers, and each other.

Sophie Gilbert, author of Girl on Girl

Erin Maglaque expands and explodes the genre of personal history. In a voice at once deeply learned and often disarmingly intimate, these explorations unravel much of what women have been told about our bodies, desires, and capacities. They embody a mode of thought that does not only describe freedom but enacts it.

Moira Weigel, author of Labor of Love

An impressive book debut . . . A richly textured, revelatory history

Kirkus Reviews, starred review

A work of remarkable archival scholarship, and a radical recovery of the history of female embodiment. As I read, the closeness of these pre-modern women was uncanny and revelatory: their voices rang in my ears, and in their words I encountered things I had felt and experienced. Extraordinary!

Harriet Baker, author of Rural Hours

A landmark book... She brings these mysterious shadowy figures to life and it's as if we hear their voices for the first time

Celia Paul, author of Self-Portrait

A wonderful history... Intimate, fascinating and touching

Ian Mortimer, author of The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England

A magnificent work of history. Erin Maglaque uncovers the inner thoughts of ordinary women who lived centuries years ago and lets us hear their voices as if they were alive with us now. And the things they have to tell us — about desire, about childcare, about sleep, sleeplessness, and death — have rarely seemed so urgent. Breathtaking, intimate, and moving, this is how history should be written in the future.

Peter Jones, author of Self-Help from the Middle Ages

An elegantly told, intricately researched reclamation of women's own experiences of their bodily lives. Tender, revelatory, and endlessly compelling, this book is a profoundly important work of historical recovery

Elinor Cleghorn, author of Unwell Women

[Presence] is thick with sensate details, and her first-person approach is embodied and appetitive… [a] fascinating book

Literary Review

[A] soulful, moving, sometimes cacophonous account of European women’s experiences and interior lives from about 1500 to 1800... Riveting

Mattie Kahn, New York Times

Excellent... What is so original about Presence is the way that Maglaque, a university historian, weaves in her own candid experiences... Maglaque demonstrates how, in the right hands, the distant past can be split open to reveal ways of living that are both thrillingly familiar and utterly strange

Kathryn Hughes, Mail on Sunday

Has all the rigour of a piece of scholarly research, and none of the trappings of the academy. It's precise, fine-tuned... and so deliciously free to move

Helen Jukes, author of Mother Animal

I’ve been savoring Erin Maglaque’s book Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body, which came out this week. She’s a really good historian, and a terrific stylist who writes with vivid, pointillistic detail about breast-feeding, infant care, sleeping, sex and pregnancy, birth—all that stuff that doesn’t usually make it into the historical record

Namara Smith, New Yorker