Stephanie Williams
Writer. Â Author. Â Journalist
The Education of Girls​
Coming of age in 4 years that changed America 1966-1970
The Education of Girls is a memoir, an unapologetic, unfiltered chronicle of how a small women's college in Massachusetts became the quiet engine behind a revolution.
A must-read for every Wellesley woman, and every grand-daughter who asks:
What did you do when everything was changing back in the '60s?​
​​Imagine a country at war. Your boyfriend taken for the draft. Sent far away to an unknown country, Vietnam. A government heedless of protest. Living in a place where birth control for single women is illegal.
I am seventeen years old. Newly arrived at smart Wellesley College. It is 1966, the eve of a convulsive time. Hillary Clinton lives across the hall. Henry Kissinger and John Kenneth Galbraith are teaching at Harvard. I am in a crucible of clever young women, demure, conservative and gently reared; a tiny and elite minority of girls. Back then a mere 7.4% of women went to university.
This is our story of how the Vietnam war, racial strife and the birth of women’s liberation fundamentally changed our lives, leading us to become very different women than the ones we were expected to be.​
Stephanie’s book brought me right back to Davis Hall and those heady days on Wellesley’s campus. A rich and stirring history of a moment when everything was changing for women in higher education.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
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May God forgive us for our sorry deeds and for our glorious intentions. So wrote Hugh Clifford, while he was acting governor of Trinidad, in 1904.
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From Nigeria to Fiji, Australia to Sri Lanka, Running the Show is a vivid portrait of empire and of men from another age, who formed so much of the world we live in today. Running the Show is the story of ordinary men, facing unimaginable circumstances. Made up of episodes from the lives of governors serving around the British Empire, it presents a kaleidoscope of people, places and events – and stories of how, for better or worse, attempts were made to bring order to often chaotic situations.
Drawing on an astonishing cache of never-seen-before material: Colonial Office dispatches, private letters, diaries and memoirs, Stephanie Williams’ account is utterly fascinating, eccentric, funny and moving, revealing the incredible personal stories of the governors and their wives.
Reviews
"Altogether admirable... the range and richness of Running the Show defies reviewers' analysis. A wonderful performance."
Jan Morris, The Times
"Williams' research is exhaustive; her descriptions of the colonial life splendidly evocative. What emerges is a valuable picture of what empire-building was like: not the well-oiled machine of legend, but rather, an 'ad hoc and messy' affair, with the odd redeeming success."
David Evans, Financial Times
"Consistently surprising, frequently stirring and often very funny... Williams has a fluent, engaging style and a finely tuned ear for an anecdote. She pays proper attention to her subjects’ romantic entanglements - a combination of hot climates, plentiful supplies of booze and boredom sounding the death knell for numerous colonial marriages...a delight."
John Preston, Daily Mail
"Richly detailed, hugely enjoyable"
Piers Brendon, The Sunday Times
" amusing and lively, stuffed full of anecdotes and interesting titbits." Amanda Foreman, New Statesman
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Sold in twelve countries
Olga's Story
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Viking Penguin 2005
Reviews
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'An epic tale: the dramatic and poignant story of an ordinary woman of extraordinary resilience caught up in some of the most devastating events of the last century.‘BBC Book of the Week, April 2005
'As good as Dr Zhivago. One of the treats of terrific literature is how it opens the doors to worlds we knew nothing about. Williams bring[s] to vibrant life the world of the middle- and upper-class Russians in Siberian towns’ Jonathan Mirsky, Spectator
‘Vivid and enthralling, brilliant and entrancing, well written and passionately researched. Reads like a novel’ Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times
‘A heartbreaking story of disaster and survival through some of the worst conflicts and upheavals of our benighted age. Moving and brilliant’ Sunday Telegraph
'In recreating Olga's Story, Stephanie Williams has managed to do something I would have thought impossible: she has given us a new vantage point from which to view the turbulent and often hellish years of the first half of the twentieth century. A beautifully written and subtly crafted book.' Jonathan Spence, Yale University, author of The Death of Woman Wang and The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci.
‘A gripping and authentic narrative of a life that was at once ordinary and remarkable’ The Times Literary Supplement ​
Olga Yunter was born in the summer of 1900 in a remote trading post surrounded by the desolate steppe of southern Siberia. The youngest of five children, there were the great family banquets at Easter; horse fairs across the border of outer Mongolia; the arrival of her father’s caravans, that had journeyed from the northern reaches of Siberia, weighed down with the furs of foxes and sable.
Olga is fifteen when mutterings of rebellion are heard in the streets. She is was swept up in the chaos of the Russian Revolution, as she helps her brothers in their desperate fight to save their town first from the Bolsheviks, and then from the brutal commander of the region’s White forces. Violent tragedy ensues.
With a price on her head, Olga flees for her life. At nineteen, alone and with only a handful of rubies sewn into her petticoats she escapes, first to Vladivostok and then to northern China. She never saw her family in Siberia again.
Based on Olga’s own stories, scraps of notebooks and letters, and painstaking research, Olga’s Story is the heart-rending account of the life of the author’s grandmother.
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Hongkong Bank
Jonathan Cape (UK) and Little Brown (USA) 1989
‘Rich drama and suspense... scrupulously objective. You feel at the end of the book that you have helped to build the pyramids, not just another bank.’ Colin Amery, Financial Times. ‘Foster Associates ‘Hongkong and Shanghai Bank is stunning, even awe-inspiring as an object, but Williams’ ‘warts and all’ account of how it was created is easily its match.’ Patrick Hannay, Architects Journal. ‘Nothing can compete with Stephanie Williams’ racy description through all the trial and tribulations of designing and building... as gripping as a detective novel.’ John Winter, Architectural Review.
Docklands
Phaidon 1993
London’s Docklands was undergoing one of the biggest urban renewal programmes in the world when this guide to the buildings of the area was published in 1993. The gigantic developments at Canary Wharf had only just begun to loom over the run-down riverside areas of east London. ‘Docklands’ remains a rare critical guide to the buildings, old and new, in this unique area of London. Providing visitors with both the historical context and a view of the future, it documents – with maps, plans and photographs – the monuments of high-pressure development.