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Presence

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What to expect

An immersive hidden history of the female body, with radical implications for how we understand our bodies today

Sex and abortion, pregnancy and birth, feeding and rocking and washing: these are embodied practices with a deep past. Yet the history of the female body remains largely unknown – even unimagined.

Combining memoir with archival research, from fragments in medical texts, trial transcripts, legal treatises, prayerbooks, letters, and diaries, Erin Maglaque assembles a chorus of women’s voices from the pre-modern past. We encounter a vanished past both strikingly recognisable and strange, when ideas of the female body, sexuality, work and pleasure were more varied, more unruly, and sometimes freer.

This is the invisible history of the female body – birthing, caring, working, desiring. Reaching deep into the shared history of women’s lives, Presence points towards a radical new way of understanding our bodies today.

'A work of remarkable archival scholarship... extraordinary' Harriet Baker
'Illuminating and brave' Alison Light
'A wonderful history... intimate, fascinating and touching' Ian Mortimer

© Erin Maglaque 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

Critics Review

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
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 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
[A] soulful, moving, sometimes cacophonous account of European women’s experiences and interior lives from about 1500 to 1800... Riveting
New York Times
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
A wonderful history... Intimate, fascinating and touching
Ian Mortimer, author of The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England
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
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
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
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
Author Erin Maglaque
Narrator Alix Dunmore
Duration 7 hours and 56 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781529973204
Format Audiobook
Publisher Random House
Genre Collected biographies, Feminism and feminist theory, Social and cultural history
Availability AU, GB, IE

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