Jonathan Cape acquires Erin Maglaque’s ‘bold’ new history of the female body

Jonathan Cape has scooped historian Erin Maglaque’s Pure Presence: A Search for Freedom in the History of the Female Body. Deputy publishing director Bea Hemming acquired British Commonwealth rights from Harriet Moore at David Higham, and the book will be published in spring 2026.

“Pure Presence is a bold new history of the female body, interweaving the archival and the personal in search of a new way of understanding our bodies,” the synopsis says. “Drawing on original archival research as well as her own experiences of the transformations of pregnancy, abortion, birth and care-giving, Erin Maglaque uncovers the hidden histories of the desiring, labouring, caring female body [...] Pure Presence charts a vibrant, intimate new method for writing history, and a revelatory and liberating way of understanding the female body today.”

Maglaque is a writer and historian at the University of Sheffield, and has held research fellowships and visiting professorships at Oxford, Harvard, the University of Toulouse and the National Humanities Center in the US. Her research explores the history of gender, the body and the family, and her essay on the history of abortion has been included in After Sex (Silver Press), alongside Jamaica Kincaid, Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich. Pure Presence is her first book.