Twenty five years ago, at an Edinburgh University Open Day, a stroppy fifth-former wandered George Square in search of a course in women’s studies. She was eventually directed to the sociology department, where a man peered through his bottle-lens specs, ran his fingers through his beard and assured her there were many lovely ladies in his syllabus and there was no need for any other courses, provision or difficult questions from lippy little snots like me.

This exchange came flooding back this week when I returned to my alma mater to collect a copy of the Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women from Edinburgh University Press. In a quarter of a century the university has gone from denying that women were a big enough subject to merit an undergraduate course, to producing a masterful (if that is not an unacceptable adjective) guide to female Scots, from the earliest saints to Lena Zavaroni.

It has been worth the wait. This book, described as “a labour of love” by its publishers, has been five years in the making. The 280 academics and other experts who contributed the 800-odd profiles worked for free.

One of the editors, Sue Innes, died of a brain tumour last year. Innes, whose background was in journalism, was adamant that each entry should be about more than a woman’s career. It should be about her life, and the other three editors stayed true to her vision. Elizabeth Ewan, an academic based at the University of Guelph in Ontario, who looked after the pre-1800 entries, says: “We didn’t want Flora MacDonald’s entry just to be about how she saved Bonnie Prince Charlie. We wanted to look at her life before and after.

“We also wanted to look at how family life impinged on their careers. For women, up until very recently, who they married and whether or not they had children had a huge impact on their lives.”

If the editorial policy is overtly feminist, treating the personal as political, giving public and private life equal weight, the end result is delightfully democratic. One of their more controversial decisions was to include a fishwife and a coalminer whose lives are representative of working women of their time rather than notable in their own right.

A quarter of the contributors are male, and Ewan is delighted that many of them are inspired to pursue their female subjects further. Academically, of course. “We are hoping that the people who read this will notice the gaps and go off and do more research. I would like to read more about ordinary women before 1600. All the entries for early women are queens, saints and members of the elite. We need to get further down the social scale.”

As it stands, the book covers witches, sailors, lots of doctors, many missionaries and all the queens and noblewomen in between. Thanks to the thematic index, anyone wondering about our foremost female landscape gardeners or music hall performers will find them helpfully grouped together.

Unlike many reference books, which assume that they are the only reference book in the world, this one acknowledges its niche and uses that to its advantage. If they are well covered elsewhere, their entry here is succinct. So Marie Stopes, the birth control pioneer, gets just half a page, leaving room for Meg of Abernethy, a professional harpist in the 14th century. There are even a few fictional characters, including DC Thompson’s formidable shelf-bosomed matriarch, Maw Broon. The only things they all have in common is that they are Scottish and, the bold but invented Mrs Broon aside, dead.

Appropriately, given its subject matter, The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women effortlessly outclasses its few male, or mixed- gender, equivalents. Its modus operandi is rigorous and academic, but its subject matter makes the book surprisingly quirky and compulsive. Don’t, I wondered for at least two seconds, men deserve such sympathetic treatment? Then I remembered a certain patronising sociology lecturer. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed that last laugh.

The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women, Edinburgh University Press, £60

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