This book, playing with the themes of Corinne, Beatrice, Sibyl, Zenobia and other figures from the past, as well as the scarlet colour of poppies and pomegranates, concentrates on the women of the Victorian era, many of whom came together in Florence, Madame de Staël, Mary Shelley, Frances Trollope, Anna Jameson, the Brontës, George Sand, Elizabeth, Félicie de Fauvau, Harriet Hosmer, Margaret Fuller, Jessie White Mario, Cristina Belgioioso, Edmonia Lewis, Sarah Parker Remond, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Alexandra Leighton, Isa Blagden and George Eliot; as well as men, Robert Browning, Hiram Powers, Walter Savage Landor, Thomas Southwood Smith, Theodore Parker, Robert Lytton, Frederick Leighton, Giuseppe Mazzini, Giuseppe Garibaldi and Frederick Douglass. These women, forbidden education or the vote, used pens and scalpels in auto-psychiatry, educating themselves and each other with novels, poems and sculptures, in solidarity for the liberation of slaves, children, and nations, whose oppression mirrored their own.
