Brenda Maddox

Maddox twice moved a woman from the margins of a famous man's story to its centre. Nora, her 1988 life of Nora Barnacle, showed Joyce's partner as a witty, independent force rather than the uneducated chambermaid of legend, drawing on letters and Galway records. Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, in 2002, used Franklin's notebooks and family papers to show the rigour of her X-ray work and how Watson's memoir had caricatured her, while declining to make her a simple martyr. Both are fair, warm and evidence-led.