Sue’s immersion in story-telling from every perspective, as actor, director, writer has transformed an historical footnote into a wonderfully vivid book: Making Trouble: Tongued with Fire – an imagined history of the two women. Drawing on fact and years of research, as well as her very pronounced and sometimes pretty whacky instinct, Sue has been able to transform the findings of her obsessive sleuthing: official records, newspaper clippings, odd photographs and so on, into a narrative filled with great dialogue and vibrant scenes that one can picture effortlessly through her vivacious command of language and very skilled understanding of how to hold an audience – or reader – captive.

With her customary wit, a beguilingly fluent historical literary style, a great command of description and an ability to free fact into fully winged fancy, I think Sue has probably come closer to the truth of these women than she could ever prove. By incorporating the sensibilities of the time they lived, with their imagined individual yearnings, triumphs, flaws, indiscretions and powerful convictions, they become three dimensional protagonists who carry the past to us. And it helps that Sue –unlike many male historians – is unafraid to draw down on her own her own experience and sensibility, and her femininity, to make them live. If it weren’t for this unconventional freedom, Harriet and Alice would remain footnotes. Sometimes it takes an imagination to free history and invigorate it for the present. But such a tactic is courageous. Luckily, Sue is brave in everything she tackles.