Kate Mosse speaks at annual Women’s Lecture

We were honoured and delighted to welcome Old Member and international best-selling author Kate Mosse CBE FRSL (1981 BA English) to give the annual Women's Lecture. 

In a lecture entitled ‘Honouring Women of Courage’, Kate Mosse shared and explored the lives of women throughout history that have been forgotten, overlooked, misremembered, written out. She honoured Licoricia of Winchester, a renowned Jewish woman from the 13th century, Joan of Arc, the Edinburgh Seven, Emily Wilding Davison, Florence Nightingale among many others. 

Of these women, she asked, ‘is it blind neglect, ignorance, is it deliberate’ that the records of the past have not included their lives and contributions? 

At the crux of her lecture and the motivation behind shining a spotlight on women that history has overlooked was this: 

‘It’s not the living of history that has left women out but the writing of history [...] Often we assume that women aren’t in history books because we don’t know about them. But often, they were known in their day. It’s just that the legacy or the writing about their story is not known’

Mosse’s non-fiction books are and have been deeply invested and concerned with this issue. Her most recent publication, Feminist History for Every Day of the Year (2025) presenting the diverse, trailblazing stories of 366 incredible women from Boudica to Taylor Swift. 

However, Mosse was far from idealistic. She also emphasised that ‘putting women back into history’ required that we must tell the full story, the good and the bad, the positive and the negative: ‘It is tempting to only put the nice ones in, or the ones that you agree with. But you can’t do that. We put all the men into history, the sinners and the saints. and we must do the same with women’. 

Kate Mosse came to New College from Chichester to study English Language and Literature in 1981. This marked the third year in which women were allowed to study at New College, meaning it was the first year that women featured in all three of the college’s undergraduate cohorts. She charmingly recalled the ‘efforts’ made by the college to welcome female students, including placing full-length mirrors across various corridors! 

Since leaving New College, Kate has led a successful career as an award-winning novelist, playwright, performer, interviewer and writer of history and memoir. The author of twelve novels and short-story collections, her books have been translated into thirty-eight languages and published in more than forty countries. Fiction includes the multimillion-selling Languedoc Trilogy (Labyrinth, Sepulchre, Citadel), the No 1 bestselling Joubert Family Chronicles (The Burning Chambers, The City of Tears, The Ghost Ship, The Map of Bones) and Gothic fiction The Taxidermist’s Daughter and The Winter Ghosts. Her highly-acclaimed non-fiction includes An Extra Pair of Hands, Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries and her first YA non-fiction book Feminist History for Every Day of the Year. The Founder Director of the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction and the Founder of the global #WomanInHistory campaign, Kate is also a trustee of the British Library, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of the Society of Authors and a Visiting Professor of Contemporary Fiction and Creative Writing at the University of Chichester. She was awarded a CBE in the King’s New Year’s Honours list 2024.