Dr Finlay was surprised when Eva told him of the offer she had received from an anonymous donor. He didn’t quite see the point, didn’t believe a Chair of Women had any internal logic, thought it a waste of good money, but since the money wasn’t his, and he couldn’t see what harm it could do, he raised no objections. Eva advertised the post widely and there were applications from all over Britain. Dr Finlay agreed that the Chair of Archipelago Women’s Studies ought to be a woman; but until it transpired that the anonymous donor had stipulated it as a condition, he insisted somewhat doggedly on interviewing at least one male. In the end, all three candidates who presented for interview were women: a reader in literature at Bristol, a post-doc in philosophy from Durham, and Dr Jen Mackae, whose specialism was gender studies.

ALICE: Eva writes in her notebooks about the thrill she felt, on reading Jen’s application. The list of publications included a paper on American nineteenth-century gynotopias. As a schoolgirl in the island of Lewis, Jen had started the island’s first and last Feminist Support & Action Group. Since then she had written a much-trolled blog about the difficulties her mother faced as a single parent, navigating the male-dominated island culture; the deference to the Free Church hierarchy, et cetera. Also, because Jen had grown up on an island, one more conservative in many ways than these, she was unlikely to flee home suffering from bright-lights withdrawal. She wouldn’t colonise college meetings with complaints about the insane amount of meat in the island diet, or the insane-inane speed at which islanders drove. She was the one Eva wanted.