“Her ideas were spectacularly prescient and important, and, as we have seen, they laid the groundwork for the two 20th-century novels about the future of the human race that are celebrated as the most visionary and thought-provoking ever written.” The novel “a lost classic of feminist protest at social engineering, and rage at media manipulation”, saying that Aldous Huxley’s utopian classic Brave New World, published 14 years later, “borrowed many of Macaulay’s ideas for Huxley’s own prophetic vision”.

The Staunch prize goes to a thriller “in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered”. The prize, given for the first time this year, was given to Australian novelist Jock Serong.

First published in 1915 by The Equal Franchise Federation Of Western Pennsylvania, with a cover showing Uncle Sam weighing men and women on his scales, The Suffrage Cook Book was assembled by a Mrs LO Kleber and included recipes for a “Pie for a Suffragist’s Doubting Husband” to a “Suffrage Angel Cake.” It is being reissued this month as The Original Suffrage Cook Book to mark the centenary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act, which allowed some women and all men the right to vote for the first time in Great Britain and Ireland.

“Recent scholarship, seeing past the naivety and misogyny of earlier work, has recognised that [Lovelace] was an able mathematician, and that her paper went beyond the ironmongery of Babbage’s never-built invention to give far reaching insights into the nature and potential of computation.”

It seems the book world doesn’t think readers want to see women of a certain age on their novels – even if that is precisely what the books are about. Take a look at some literary novels about older women – Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child, Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread, Carol Shields’ Unless – and you’ll see a lighthouse, two children wearing fairy wings, a young couple in a car and a child standing on her head.

“It’s way past time for something more original,” Lawless writes on the prize’s website. “As violence against women in fiction reaches a ridiculous high, the Staunch book prize invites thriller writers to keep us on the edge of our seats without resorting to the same old cliches – particularly female characters who are sexually assaulted (however ‘necessary to the plot’), or done away with (however ingeniously).”

Showing exquisitely detailed images of the plants, insects, spiders, butterflies and amphibians of Suriname at the turn of the 18th century, Merian’s Metamorphosis insectorum surinamensium caused a sensation when it was published in 1705, with George III acquiring her work for the royal collection. Sotheby’s said it was “one of the most important natural history books of the period”, with very few studies of insects having been done previously, and Merian one of the first naturalists to observe them directly, as well as one of the first female scientific explorers.