Description: Throughout history, women have rarely been expected to take their lives into their hands, set out on their own, have independent, off-the-beaten-path adventures. But that is exactly what many of them did, and in portraits that are meticulously researched and set forth in a beguiling narrative Barbara Holland tells us their stories. Here are Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Bonnie Parker (of Bonnie and Clyde), Amelia Earhart, George Sand, Isadora Duncan, Mata Hari, Belle Starr, and their lesser-known sisters in adventure and spirit -- Gertrude Bell, uncrowned queen of Iraq; Daisy Bates, Victorian anthropologist of the Australian aborigines; American pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read; Queen Jinga of Angola, and many more.

These are women for whom custom, expectation, convention, and protocol meant little, women who reveled in the limitlessness of possibility and desire. Under Holland's pen, these irrepressible adventurers come vividly and entertainingly to life.

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