No Man's Land podcast review: Meet history's renaissance women

“Here’s what most people know about Sylvia Plath — that she killed herself,” says Alexis Coe, eye roll implicit.

Shots fired: the mission of this podcast — by US female members’ club The Wing, coming soon to London — is to rewrite the dominant narratives about female figures from history: “women who are too bad for your textbooks — a woman who broke the rules, who history forgot about, ignored or just got wrong”.

In the Plath episode, Coe, along with scholars — and snippets of Plath herself, reciting poetry in her clipped, Massachusetts tones, coquettish on the BBC — unpicks the legacy, the “myth of Plath, the perennial depressive”.

Coe argues that “we read her life backwards”, focusing on her death and ignoring the lightness, her ambition and femininity.

There is, by these accounts, veiled misogyny in the way Plath acolytes are treated — as “moody goth girls, as if Plath is a phase one grows out of”.

Other episodes give journalist Ida B Wells and performance artist Ana Mendieta the same treatment.

If it sounds too cerebral for the commute — it’s not (quite) — there’s enough pace and sass to keep it chatty, and Coe is a bright, engaged and engaging host.

In 2018, you can’t keep a good woman down, no matter how historical.

Listen to No Man's Land on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher