BBC Magazine had a quote of the week about the Essex Women's Advisory
Group, a new charity intended to boost the self-esteem of women from
Essex, commonly known as Essex Girls:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_girl

The chairman of the charity is a man, George Courtauld, who says that
Essex women are "noisy and blowsy and laugh a lot." Well anyway, the
charity website has a competition for creating a video about a famous
Essex woman:

—
1. Form a group of up to six people. A majority of the group should be female.
2. Decide on your notable Essex woman.
3. Write a proposal for a 3-5 minute film about your subject.
—
http://essexwomensadvisorygroup.com/#/film-competition/4538761129

I couldn't find four women who cared, so I got a bit stuck on the
first point. Indeed I only know two people from East Anglia that I can
think of, and they're both men. Notwithstanding this problem I decided
to skip on to point two.

Which would be the best Essex woman to make a movie about? I knew that
Dame Helen Mirren is an Essex woman because they say so on the charity
website I believe, but I couldn't honestly think of any others.
Wikipedia has categories of people who live in certain places, so I
started to trawl all of the Essex categories for famous women.

I should note that I define famous here in terms of actual fame, so
this excludes glamour models, minor actresses, and presenters. With
that in mind, guess how many famous Essex women I found after half an
hour of research? Fifty? Twenty? Even as many as ten? Nope.

In fact I found seven, maybe eight. They are: Dame Helen Mirren, Sally
Gunnell, Alison Moyet, Joan Sims, Suzi Quatro, Dame Leah Manning, and
Sarah Fuller Flower Adams. The possible eighth is Emma Chambers, who
is probably famous enough to count.

This was actually a little bit depressing, but I suppose it's probably
also true that Wikipedia has a great bias away from people like
scientists, artists, and historians, and more towards actresses and
musicians. Perhaps there are some others that I've missed, and often
minor figures tend to be greater than the well known people anyway.

--
Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/