The Gentlewoman's Book of Sports

It was not easy to be a sportswoman at the end of the nineteenth century. Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games, said in 1896: "No matter how toughened a sportswoman may be, her organism is not cut out to sustain certain shocks." Women competed in the Olympics for the first time in 1900.

The "white sailor hats" and the "confu- sion between you, your hat, and the ball" in Lady Greville's book may now seem charmingly old-fashioned—until we remember that in 2015, more th…