A great week to be born...

A short list of birth dates:

March 30: Anna Sewell (1820-1878) - author of Black Beauty - yes, pure melodrama, but like many, many seven-year-olds before me, I was entranced. (And the book hasn't been out of print in 130 years.)

April 2: Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) - she took what we might call a mid-life gap year, or otherwise an astonishing adventure, and made it pay with her art. (Some of the images here. Or you can see some of the originals in the Enlightenment Gallery at the British Museum - I admire them regularly.)

April 3: Jane Digby (1807-1881) - more full-on adventure - this English aristocrat eloped with the Greek count, then ran off with an Albanian general, then finally finished up with a desert sheik about 20 years her junior. But really, what she loved, I reckon, was adventure.

(I know these dates thanks to the excellent Born On This Day Yahoo group, which has a daily email on a woman subject, complete with a links and references collection.)