LONDON, March 6, 2023 (BSS/AFP) - From the opera star who went on stage 
smothered in diamonds to a young widow left penniless with a small child in 
19th-century Britain, a new wave of "herstories" are spotlighting female 
voices ignored or even erased by history.

The UK's Royal Opera House and the National Trust heritage charity are among 
those delving back into the past to tell the story of previously forgotten 
lives.

At London's Covent Garden opera venue, visitors can now discover the 
theatre's own "herstory" on a tour celebrating the many forgotten women who 
helped shape it.

Nineteenth-century composer Ethel Smyth had to threaten to run away from home 
to persuade her family to allow her to study music.

After winning them over and attending the Leipzig Conservatory in Germany, 
she had a huge success with her "Mass in D".

"People absolutely loved it but she had to fight tooth and nail both against 
critics and also some of the musicians themselves who refused to work with a 
woman," said Royal Opera House tour guide Amandine Riche.

Despite the acclaim, Smyth found herself accused of being "out of her depth" 
if she pursued typically masculine pieces such as "Mass in D", or "light and 
frivolous" if she restricted herself to chamber music, she said.

- Forgotten star -

Composer Giuseppe Verdi paid tribute to another long-forgotten female 
performer, Adelina Patti, as the greatest singer he had ever heard.

A huge international star of her day, she charged the present day equivalent 
of $100,000 a performance and once arrived wearing a dress covered in 3,700 
diamonds that was worth $23 million.

Officers from the nearby now-closed Bow Street police station had to be 
dressed up as extras and go on stage to keep an eye on it during the show.

But it is not just the lives of rich and famous women who have been sidelined 
by a male-led narrative.

For this year's International Women's Day on Wednesday, Britain's National 
Trust is telling the story of some of the ordinary working women whose lives 
have slipped into obscurity.

The Trust, Europe's biggest conservation body, has drawn on research into 
women who lived in a cluster of 19th-century homes, now preserved and 
restored, in the heart of Birmingham, central England.

The houses are the only ones to survive the mass redevelopment of the city 
centre in the 1960s.

"It's an opportunity to shine a light on people we don't hear about very 
often but these were real people who lived in these houses which is 
fascinating," said National Trust spokeswoman Sophie Flyn.

Visitors can walk through the cobblestone courtyard where the women would 
have hung out their washing and peer into the rooms where they lived and 
slept.

- Real lives -

"You get a real sense of what their lives might have been like," said Flyn. 

One of the women who lived there was widow Eliza Wheeler, who ran a market 
stall, and her daughter Sarah.

"Being widowed and left with children in the Victorian era... that would have 
been challenging but somehow she managed," Flyn added.

Maria Beadell, founder of London's Herstorical Tours, said there was a 
growing appetite for history from a female perspective.

Her first historical re-enactment tour, launched in 2021, focused on London's 
witches and was so popular that last year she added a second telling the 
story of the capital's 18th-century sex workers.

Beadell said that unlike monarchs or other noble females, ordinary London 
women's stories had largely been "erased from history".

Her tours tell the stories of Marjery Jourdemayne, a midwife accused of 
witchcraft who was burned at the stake in 1441, and Sally Salisbury, an 18th-
century courtesan jailed for stabbing one of her lovers.

"It's just the way the world's been for over 2,000 years, the male voice has 
been dominant... but these were actual people who lived," she said.