Katherine MacInnes: Snow Widows PERTH

Through newly-found archive material and photographs, Katherine MacInnes reconstructs the lives of five women – wives, mothers and sisters of the men participating in Robert Falcon Scott’s polar expedition – offering a fresh and utterly different perspective on the race to the South Pole. In a gripping and remarkable feat of historical reconstruction, she vividly depicts the lives, loves and losses of the ‘snow widows’, describing the women’s attitudes to the expedition, their place in society, and the agony of distance, where it could take a year to receive news from the expedition, “a world of dangers that [they] cannot share.”