I was now in my thirties, heading up European communications for an American multinational. I remember no other women at my managerial level, few enough in the company at all. I was learning first-hand how women exercise power in environments dominated by men. Cecily seemed to be getting closer. Within a few years I’d leave to set up my own business, which I ran for twenty years. But I’d made myself a promise. For now I had to make my way in the world. That done, I’d find Cecily’s story. I’d tell it.

So, in 2017, age fifty-five, I stopped work, started a creative writing MA at Warwick University and gave myself two years to bring Cecily to the page.

At the same time – serendipity – the historian and specialist in medieval women, Joanna Laynesmith, published a biography of Cecily. I read it and begged her to have lunch with me. We talked through to dinner. I compared what I’d long suspected about Cecily to what she knew. Matched my storyteller’s intuition to her meticulous scholarship. In the days that followed, the shadow figure of Cecily came gradually into focus. Here was a woman who could give any of us a lesson in how to operate as a woman in a man’s world.

I’d long understood that the journey towards female emancipation hasn’t been a steady upward progression. Medieval women, especially those of the aristocracy, or in what we might today think of as the middle classes, had freedoms their Victorian counterparts, or even our post-war mothers, could only dream of. They could own property, run businesses, take up trades. Widows, especially, could achieve significant economic independence. Men ruled, certainly, but in the margins women could exercise agency, assume authority, push boundaries. Women of Cecily’s status, with huge households and vast estates, would be responsible for enterprises similar in size and complexity to mid-sized FTSE companies. They were, in short, women of business.

At the same time, they’d be expected to support their husband’s political career and advance their family’s interests within intricate and hierarchical social networks. Above all, they were expected to breed. Failure at that negated all else. Come now, did you really think it was only twenty-first-century women who were expected to ‘do it all’?