First edition, first impression. Best-known now for her acclaimed collection of ghost stories Randall's Round (1929), it was her popular histories of women, drawing on her experiences as a schoolteacher, that were "her greatest successes with the public" (Aigner, p. 341). Copies of Heroic Women are scarce in its illustrated jacket. Helen Madeline Leys (1892-1965) published under the pennames Peter Redcliffe Shore and Eleanor Scott, and she is now known by the latter pseudonym. After graduating from Somerville College, Oxford, Scott became a teacher and wrote Heroic Women and Adventurous Women (1933) to fill what she saw a gap in the market for inspirational books aimed at young women. This collection relays the stories of Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale, and three missionaries: Mother St. Dominic of China, Christina Forsyth, and Mary Bird. Scott's "shrewd and uncanny" grasp of the emotional lives of women in her fiction led to her description in contemporary reviews "as an understa