The Enlightened Virago: Princess Dashkova through the Eyes of Others,

Dashkova’s exploits made her one of the most talked-about women of the Enlightenment. Aged just 19, Dashkova overthrew the Tsar to put her friend Catherine the Great on the Russian throne. After her husband’s early death, she took control of his precarious finances, and travelled around Europe with her two young children. In her thirties she lived in Edinburgh for two years to put her son through the university; while in Scotland, she raised more than a few eyebrows with her cross-dressing, and became the first Russian to tour the Highlands (her account of this tour still exists). By 40, Dashkova was the head of not one but two Russian Academies – of science and of language and literature – the first woman in Europe to hold an equivalent office. She was by most accounts an extremely capable administrator of the Russian Academy of Sciences, making it solvent again, expanding its collections and buildings, and bringing many foreign scholars and scholarship to Russia and Russian. At the Russian Academy she made great personal contributions to Russian linguistics, and promoted literature in Russian – her second language, which she learned so she could communicate with her husband’s Muscovite family. However, after eleven years at the helm, she fell foul of Catherine’s paranoia and retired to her estate – before being briefly exiled to Siberia by Catherine’s son Paul. A few years before her death, when her house guest Catherine Wilmot recognised her capabilities, thinking ‘she would be most in her element at the Helm of the State’, Dashkova had disappeared from the world stage into obscurity – an obscurity in which she still languishes.