Rachel Cooke

Do you know what was going on in the 1950s? Was there such a thing then as ‘the typical British woman’? And if there was, what was she like? And if there was not, what were women up to?

Award-winning features writer and interviewer for the Observer and television critic for the New Statesman, Rachel Cooke is the author of Her Brilliant Career, in which she revisits and rediscovers an entertaining and unforgettable cast of ten career women who inspired, influenced, and sometimes shocked, the decade. These women were extraordinary but they were also quintessentially of the years that brought us the electric mixer, the first Miss World contest and the publications of Lessing’s The Grass is Singing and de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.