Jenny Uglow celebrates National Women’s History Month, and its theme ‘women inspiring innovation through imagination’, with a talk about Sarah Losh, who built an extraordinary church in a village near Carlisle in the 1840s. As a woman innovator, Losh broke all conventions in designing the church, supervising its building, and even carving the alabaster – 60 years before women architects were accepted into the RIBA. Jenny Uglow’s books include Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future and, most recently, The Pinecone, a biography of Sarah Losh. Her work has won her numerous prizes, and enormous critical acclaim. ‘No one,’ writes A.S. Byatt, ‘gives us a feel for the past as Jenny Uglow does.’ Writer, critic and broadcaster Hermione Lee has written biographies of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, and is working on a life of Penelope Fitzgerald.

Part of the LSE Space for Thought Literary Festival.

Recorded on Friday 1 March 2013.