Their names still echo down the ages: The Great Pyramid at Giza. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The Temple of Artemis. The statue of Zeus at Olympia. The mausoleum of Halikarnassos. The Colossus at Rhodes. The Lighthouse of Alexandria. The Seven Wonders of the World were staggeringly audacious impositions on our planet. They were also brilliant adventures of the mind, test cases of the reaches of human imagination. Now only the pyramid remains, yet the scale and majesty of these seven wonder...

In Homer's Odyssey, Penelope famously unpicks the threads of a shroud at night to put off marrying a hapless suitor. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Philomela weaves the story of her rape into a tapestry after she is deprived of the power of speech. Male writers were generally happy to imagine mythological women turning their daily chores into creative exercises in self-expression. It did not always occur to men that real women might be up to something just as interesting. These women, the missing t...