The Scandalous Ladies Football Club by Frances Quinn

Meet Minnie Newton – 27-year-old spinster, troublemaker and founder of the first ever women’s football club…London, 1887: schoolteacher Minnie Newton is horrified when her female pupils placidly accept the limitations Victorian society puts on their ambitions and their lives. To show them women can do anything, she places a newspaper ad, seeking women to join a football team. From a handful of replies, she puts together a motley collection to form a squad that’s keen but mostly hopeless. Soon the women fall in love with the game and decide to play in public and their matches begin to draw big crowds. But Minnie has a secret and soon all the attention her notorious team is getting starts to threaten the life she has built for herself. Can she toe the line between independence and safety or will the truth about who she is come out…? A story inspired by real-life Victorian women, who showed the world that women can do anything they put their minds to, even if they are ridiculed for it at first…