Those who didn’t fit the moral code of Victorian England, or sat outside the narrative of conquest, were repackaged or removed from the record. Individuals like Alfred the Great fared well, preserved for posterity by Victorian historians as a great military leader. But his daughter Æthelflæd was overlooked. A military strategist and social reformer of a kind that almost eclipsed her father in her lifetime, she didn’t fit with Victorian notions of a woman’s place in society. Women of the past were recast as reflections of what Victorian society wanted them to be.
